Bier, Jesse

Jesse Bier's career encompasses both literary and academic fields. He has written novels, short stories, poetry, and plays as well as scholarly articles, a standard history of American humor, and varied essays. He was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, about which he writes in the recent Transatlantic Lives, which also portrays much of France, primarily in WWII, in which he took part and was wounded in the battle for the Remagen bridgehead on the German Rhine. It was during his recovery at the American recuperation center in Biaritz, France, that he met his future French wife in the summer of 1945.