From his official website (markhelprin.com):

Born in 1947, Mark Helprin was raised on the Hudson and in the British West Indies. After receiving degrees from Harvard College and Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, he did postgraduate work at the University of Oxford, Princeton, and Columbia. He has served in the British Merchant Navy, the Israeli infantry, and the Israeli Air Force. He was published in The New Yorker for almost a quarter of a century, and his stories and essays on politics and aesthetics appear in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Criterion, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The New York Times, The National Review, American Heritage, Forbes ASAP, and many other publications here and abroad. Aaron & Helen L. DeRoy Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, former Guggenheim Fellow and Senior Fellow of the Hudson Institute, and Adviser on Defense and Foreign Relations to presidential candidate Robert Dole, he has been awarded the National Jewish Book Award and the Prix de Rome, among other prizes. Translated into more than a dozen languages, his books include A Dove of the East & Other Stories, Refiner's Fire, Ellis Island & Other Stories, Winter's Tale, Swan Lake (With illustrations by Chris Van Allsburg), A Soldier of the Great War, Memoir from Antproof Case, A City in Winter and The Veil of Snows (both with illustrations by Chris Van Allsburg), The Pacific & Other Stories, and Freddy and Fredericka.