Novelist Howard Langer
Howard Langer was born in Manhattan in 1950. He attended the City College of New York when its English faculty included, among others, William Gaddis and Joseph Heller. He obtained a teacher’s degree from the Greenberg Institute in Jerusalem where he had the opportunity to study under the poet, Yehuda Amichai, and the novelist, Aharon Appelfeld. He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Toronto. While Langer won awards for his fiction as an undergraduate, he ultimately attended law school at the University of Pennsylvania where he has taught for the last twenty years. His law practice has specialized in protecting the vulnerable. His most notable case was a class action that recovered $200 million from a bank that had abetted fraudulent telemarketers who preyed on the poor and elderly, recovering all the funds that had been stolen. Langer began writing The Last Dekreptizer, his first novel, in 2021 after attending a zoom workshop by George Saunders sponsored by the Free Library of Philadelphia at the height of the Covid pandemic. Inspired by Saunders' presentation, he began writing the next morning what eventually morphed into the novel. The novel has won a National Jewish Book Award and was a finalist for the Athenaeum Award. Howard and his wife live in Philadelphia. He has two adult sons.