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PING! (See also my previous post.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/08/fashion/08BEAU.html?pagewanted=all

Mr. Friedlander grew up in Redding, Conn., in what he called a “typical fractured middle-class family.” His mother died of a brain hemorrhage when he was 17, he said. When he was 25, his stepfather, a heavy drinker and smoker, died as well. As Mr. Friedlander put it, “He died of her dying.”

Mr. Friedlander traces his political awakening to St. Luke’s prep school in New Canaan, Conn.

“They liked to create inhibited young boys and girls,” he said, “and my inhibition never kicked in.”

After college at Bennington, he earned a master’s degree in English romantic literature at Oxford University and another master’s in Scandinavian literature at Columbia, before trying a short-term gig at Knopf. He started Context with his life savings — $10,000 — and with a dream of discovering and publishing great fiction. He set up shop in the dingy windowless cell he still occupies on lower Broadway with a single assistant, but finding the next Faulkner or Fitzgerald wasn’t so easy.