Paul J. Schwartz

Paul J. Schwartz is a contemporary American writer. His lifelong interest in and love for France led him to publish L'Art de Vivre: a Fable AbOUT Paris in the 1930s in 2003 and Waiting for Sam in 2009, two novels set in France.

Paul Schwartz was born in Stamford, Connecticut, April 11, 1945. His family moved to the semi-rural village of Bloomfield, Connecticut, when he was five, and he lived there throughout his school and undergraduate college years, and until he was married in 1969.

His childhood was mostly happy and peaceful, in an idyllic pastoral setting. The only disturbances were the frequently loud arguments between his parents which continued until his father moved out of the house to New York City early in the 1960s, which led to the divorce of his parents in 1967.

Paul was an extremely successfully student who excelled in language studies and mathematics. In 1959 his parents enrolled him in a college preparatory school, the Loomis School , from which he graduated in 1963 near the top of his class. He also had a distinguished athletic career in high school, wrestling with the varsity team, and serving as captain of a very successful tennis team.

He enrolled at Harvard in the fall of 1963, intending to major in mathematics. Very early in his first year of college, he found the study of literature more satisfying than math, and decided to spend the next year studying in Paris, France . During that year he met Lucy McCallum, a student from Salem College in North Carolina . They began a friendship which led to romance and their marriage in 1969, which lasted until her death in 2009.

After his return from a year in France , Paul considered a career in law, but ultimately decided to continue his study of French literature to pursue a PhD at Yale. He wrote an undergraduate thesis on Proust’s La Recherche du Temps Perdu (1966), and a graduate thesis on Mallarmé’s “Les Noces d’Hérodiade.” (1971)

Paul and his wife Lucy – who completed her Harvard PhD in French in 1972 – were both recruited for the faculty of the Modern Language Department at the University of North Dakota, where they spent 18 successful years as college professors and administrators. Paul chaired the Language Department for 10 years and directed the University Honors Program for four. They had two sons while they were in North Dakota , Andrew born in 1975, and Judson in 1980.

By the late 1980s, Paul sought to leave North Dakota to return to the east coast. He had successive administrative appointments at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania (1989-1991), Penn State University (1991-1998), and the State University of New York at Fredonia (1998-2006). In 2006 he accepted in appointment to be Dean of the Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence , a position from which he resigned late in 2008, when he and his wife Lucy moved to Houston, Texas , for treatment of Lucy’s medical condition.

While in North Dakota , Paul had become very active in theatre, acting, directing and assuming managerial responsibility for the Fire Hall Theatre in Grand Forks . He began writing for the theatre in the in 1980s, which led directly to his first published novel, L’Art de Vivre (2003), which was based on two plays he had written in the 1980s. His move in 2007 to Aix-en-Provence helped him develop background material for his second novel, Waiting for Sam (2009), which he had begun immediately after the publication of L’Art de Vivre, and which he finished in Houston in 2009.