Caleb Carr, Military Historian And Author Of Bestselling Novel ‘The Alienist,’ Dies At 68

NEW YORK — Caleb Carr, the damaged and bright son of Beat founder Lucien Carr, who overcame a traumatic childhood to become a successful novelist, excellent military historian, and late-life memoirist of his faithful cat, Masha, died at the age of 68.

Carr died of cancer on Thursday, according to a notice from his publisher, Little, Brown and Company.

“Caleb lived his writing life valiantly, with works of politics, history, and sociology, but most astonishingly for this historian, with wildly entertaining fiction,” Carr’s editor, Joshua Kendall, said.

Caleb Carr, a native of Manhattan, was born into literary and cultural history. Lucien Carr and Columbia University classmates Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg helped start the Beat movement, a pioneering and influential force in the post-World War II era for improvisation and nonconformity – both on and off the page. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and other Beats like William Burroughs and Herbert Huncke were regular guests to the Carr apartment, where Caleb Carr remembers gatherings that were stimulating, perplexing, and, at times, terrifying.

“Kerouac was a really pleasant guy. In 1997, Carr told Salon that Allen Ginsberg may be a very charming guy. “But they weren’t children people.”

Lucien Carr would prove his son’s worst fear. The elder Carr was imprisoned in the 1940s for manslaughter in connection with the murder of his former friend David Kammerer, who clashed with him and was later discovered in the Hudson River. Caleb Carr, born more than a decade later to Lucien Carr and Francesca von Hartz, thought he might become the next victim. With a “gleeful” mood, his father would hit Caleb on the back of the head and routinely knock him down flights of stairs, blaming him for the falls.

Caleb Carr regarded his parents as “the mostly drunken architects” of his household, and they split when he was young. After rejecting Kerouac’s proposal, his mother married writer John Speicher, father of three daughters. Carr and his two brothers called their new, blended family “The Dark Brady Bunch.”

Caleb Carr | AP news Image

Caleb Carr, Military Historian And Author Of Bestselling Novel ‘The Alienist,’ Dies At 68

Caleb Carr’s suffering taught him to hate violence, fear insanity, and investigate the causes of cruelty. In his best-known book, “The Alienist,” John Schuyler Moore is a New York Times police reporter in 1890s Manhattan who assists in the investigation of a series of brutal killings of adolescent boys. Carr referred to the story as a “whydunit” as well as a “whodunit,” and incorporated references to the rising 19th-century study of psychology as Moore and his friend Dr. Laszlo Kreizler investigate not only the killer’s identity but also what motivated him to do his murders.

“The Alienist,” released in 1994, is the type of meticulously researched, old-fashioned page-turner the Beats had resisted. It mixes fictitious characters like Moore with real people ranging from financial magnate J.P. Morgan to restaurant Charlie Delmonico. Carr also features the city’s police commissioner at the time, Theodore Roosevelt, with whom the author shared an unexpected bond.

“Personally and psychologically, I had always found TR one of the most compelling figures in U.S. history,” Carr told Strand Magazine.

“Later, I recognized that some of this was due to the fact that, as a young man plagued by physical problems and the concerns they induce, his father, a truly sympathetic and caring guy, helped him through his darkest days. This is frequently the secret to outstanding guys with noble hearts: an openly caring father. Having had the opposite — a father who was the primary source of my early worries and maladies — I was lured to what was, for me, an exotic environment.”

“The Alienist” sold millions of copies, inspired the bestseller sequel “Angel of Darkness,” and was made into a TNT miniseries starring Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans, and Dakota Fanning. Carr’s success as a novelist overshadowed, if not trivialized, his experience as a military historian. He taught military history at Bard College, was a contributing editor for the Quarterly Journal of Military History, and had a close relationship with the academic James Chace, with whom he co-authored “America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars.”

Caleb Carr | Bloomberg Image

Caleb Carr, Military Historian And Author Of Bestselling Novel ‘The Alienist,’ Dies At 68

Carr had been writing on prospective terrorism against the United States for years before publishing a book-length analysis a few months after the attacks on September 11, 2001. In “The Lessons of Terror,” he argued that military attacks against civilian populations invariably fail, drawing on lessons from ancient Rome. “The Lessons of Terror” did well, but some commentators believed he was not up to the task.

New York Times writer Michiko Kakutani commented that Carr “has little credibility as a military historian or political analyst,” and urged he stick to thrillers, while Salon’s Laura Miller described some of his claims as “slippery and elusive as a handful of live minnows.” Enraged, Carr responded with an all-caps letter to Salon’s editor, suggesting that Miller and Kakutani abandon military history instead of “chattering about bad women’s fiction.”

“Several reviews have made claims concerning my credibility that are, quite simply, libelous, and will be dealt with soon,” he later stated on Amazon.com, where he awarded his book a 5-star rating.

Carr’s other works were the Sherlock Holmes story “The Italian Secretary,” the historical study “The Devil Soldier,” and a 2024 memoir that served as his artistic goodbye, “My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Saved Me.”

As a child, Carr was so appalled by human behavior that he began to empathize with cats – and became persuaded he was once one. Carr spent much of his adult life alone, or with no other people, living in a big stone house in upstate New York, made possible by profits from “The Alienist” and other writings, on a 1,400-acre property in the foothills of Misery Mountain.

In “My Beloved Monster,” he described his experience as “abuse, mistrust, and then the search for just one creature on Earth” upon whom he could rely. In 2005, his search led him to the Rutland County Humane Society in Vermont, where he observed a gold and white kitten with large, deep amber eyes, a Siberian who mewed “conversationally” as Carr approached her cage

Caleb Carr | NY Times Image

Caleb Carr, Military Historian And Author Of Bestselling Novel ‘The Alienist,’ Dies At 68

“I answered her with, with both sounds and words, and more importantly held my hand up so that we could get my scent, pleased when she inspected the hand with her nose and found it satisfactory,” he wrote in his letter. “Then I slowly closed and reopened my eyes many times, mimicking the’slow blink’ that cats interpret as a gesture of friendship. She seems interested, taking the time to affirm with a similar blink. Finally, she mirrored my hand movement by raising her gigantic paws to mine, as if we had known each other for a long time: an intimate gesture.”

Carr and Masha would live together for the next 17 years, attuned to each other’s moods and musical tastes until Masha died. “My Beloved Monster” was a type of dual elegy. As Masha’s health deteriorated, Carr developed neuropathy and pancreatitis, which he attributed to his childhood trauma. Watching Masha die while lying in a makeshift coffin was like bidding goodbye to his “other self.”

“Some people believe that mourning is a healing process; I have never found this to be true. It leaves scars, and scars do not heal. I’ve never had someone who has been a part of my everyday reality for as long as Masha; how can it heal?” Carr wrote.

“It appears that since my arrival on this planet, I have been as tough for my fellow humans as they have been for me, going beyond the easy areas of social convention and amusement. But Masha asks no such queries. I was enough; not just enough, but enough to justify defending.”

SOURCE – (AP)