Andrew Solomon worked on a book about how families deal with various kinds of challenging offspring — families of people who are deaf, autistic, schizophrenic, of prodigies, of people who commit crimes, and so on. Later published as Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (Scribner, 2012), the book relates how families raising exceptional children not only learn to deal with their challenges, but also find profound meaning in doing so. Far From the Tree received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, among others. His book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression won the 2001 National Book Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has been published in 24 languages. He is a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center.
Portrait by Marilyn Clark
