Biography
Leonard Swidler was born in Sioux City, Iowa to Josephine Marie Reed Swidler (1901–62) and Samuel Swidler (1897–1984). His father was a Ukrainian Jew who had come to the U.S. at age 15, and his mother was an Irish-American Catholic. Eventually the family moved to Cumberland, Wisconsin, and then to Green Bay, where his parents owned and operated the Bay Beauty Shop until after World War II, when they bought a home in Allouez and set up a beauty parlor there. Samuel worked in a paper mill in DePere and Josephine continued to run the hair salon. In 1935 Leonard's brother Jack was born, followed in 1940 by his sister Sandra.
In 1957, while they were graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, Leonard Swidler and Arlene Anderson were married. They have two daughters, Carmel (born 1958) and Eva (born 1962, and one granddaughter, Willow (born 2000). Leonard and Arlene Swidler lived in Philadelphia since 1966. Arlene died at home in 2008 after suffering from Alzheimer's for 17 years
Swidler has published over 80 books and 200 articles. He has lectured on Catholicism, Ecumenism, Interreligious Dialogue, and Global Ethics all over the world, including Austria, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, England, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Macedonia, Malaysia, Morocco, Myanmar, Pakistan, Poland, Republic of Congo, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tunisia, and, of course, the United States.
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“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)