Nicholas Gage

Nicholas Gage was born in 1939 in a remote Greek village in Epirus, Lia, and in 1949 he fled to the United States with his three sisters during the civil war. He studied in schools in Worcester, Massachusetts, and earned a scholarship to the School of Public Communication at Boston University. In 1964, he received a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and began his journalism career at the Associated Press and newspapers such as The Boston Herald Traveller, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, where he worked from 1970 to 1980. During that period, he wrote three books on organized crime, as well as two novels. He was awarded the Hearst Award, the Page One Award from the Newspaper Guild, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award. In 1980, he left the Times to fulfill a long-standing promise to himself: to write the story of his mother's life and death. "Eleni" was translated into twenty-six languages, was named Book of the Month, was nominated for Best Biography by the National Book Critics Circle, and received the Heinemann Award as the best book of 1984 from the Royal Society of Literature in Great Britain. The film adaptation of "Eleni," starring John Malkovich and Kate Nelligan, was released in 1985. His next book, "A Place for Us," was widely praised as a moving epic about the modern immigrant experience, while his books about his homeland, "Hellas" and "Greece-Land of Light," were lauded for expressing "an almost reverent love for Greece," as noted by The New Yorker. He has also been awarded five honorary doctorate degrees, with another one bestowed upon him by Boston University in 1985. In awarding him the degree, University President John Silber remarked, "Like J. Conrad and S. Beckett, you write in your second language with a mastery that is rarely achieved by those writing in their native tongue. As a refugee and immigrant, as you climbed to the top of your challenging profession, you remained faithful both to your homeland and to the colony of its sons and daughters transplanted to America." Beyond writing books, he has also pursued a career in film, serving as a co-producer for the film adaptation of "Eleni" and as a production manager for "The Godfather Part III." He is an active member of AHEPA and the World Council of Hellenes Abroad, and in 1988 he was honored by Patriarch Bartholomew with the title of Archon, Teacher of the Nation. He also served as president of the Panepirotic Federation. Nicholas Gage and his wife, Joan Paulson, a classmate from Columbia University and also a writer, have three children: Christos, a screenwriter living in Los Angeles; Eleni, a magazine editor in New York; and Marina, an interior designer living in Boston.