Caleb Carr, whose bestselling 1994 novel The Alienist made the author a household name and was adapted into a 10-episode limited series on TNT, died of cancer Thursday at his home in Cherry Plains, New York.
He was 68. His death was announced by his brother Ethan Carr to The New York Times. Carr was born on August 2, 1955, into a New York City family haunted by violence and abuse: His father was Lucien Carr, a Beat Generation journalist convicted of manslaughter for the 1944 killing of his childhood sexual predator.
The fatal stabbing, which made headlines and history not least because Lucien’s friend and Columbia University classmate Jack Kerouac helped dispose of the knife, was depicted in the 2013 film Kill Your Darlings starring Daniel Radcliffe and Dane DeHaan.
Caleb Carr would later say that the incident, along his own childhood abuse at the hands of his father, spawned a lifelong obsession with violence, an obsession given creative voice in The Alienist.
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