Caleb Carr, the son of the Beat poet Lucien Carr who endured a traumatizing childhood and became a bestselling novelist, accomplished military historian and late-life memoirist of his cat, Masha, has died at 68.
Carr died of cancer on Thursday, according to an announcement 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 works of fiction,” Carr’s editor, Joshua Kendall, said in a statement.
A native of Manhattan, Caleb Carr was born into literary and cultural history. Lucien Carr, along with Columbia University classmates Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, helped found the Beat movement. Kerouac, Ginsberg and such fellow Beats as William Burroughs and Herbert Huncke were frequent visitors to the Carr apartment, where Caleb Carr remembered gatherings that were enriching, bewildering and, at times, terrifying.
“Kerouac was a very nice man. Allen [Ginsberg] could be a very nice guy,” Carr told Salon in 1997. “But they weren’t children people.”
Caleb Carr, abused by his father as a child, thought of his parents as “the mostly drunken architects” of his household, and they divorced when he was young. His mother, after turning down Kerouac’s proposal, married the writer John Speicher, the father of three girls. Carr and his two brothers referred to their new, blended family as “The Dark Brady Bunch”.
In his best-known book, 1994’s The Alienist, John Schuyler Moore is a New York Times police reporter in 1890s Manhattan who helps investigative a series of vicious murders of adolescent boys. Carr would call the novel as much a “whydunnit” as a “whodunnit”, and wove in references to the emerging 19th-century discipline of psychology.
It sold millions of copies, inspired the bestselling sequel Angel of Darkness and was adapted into a TNT miniseries that starred Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning. Carr was so successful a novelist that his background as a military historian became obscured, or even trivialized. He taught military history at Bard College, was a contributing editor to the Quarterly Journal of Military History and had a close relationship with the scholar James Crace, with whom he wrote America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars.
Carr had written for years about possible terrorism against the US and published a book-length study a few months after the September 11 attacks. In The Lessons of Terror, he contended that military campaigns against civilian populations inevitably failed and drew upon lessons dating back to ancient Rome. The Lessons of Terror sold well, but some critics thought he was not up to the job.
The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that Carr “has little credibility as military historian or political analyst”, and suggested he stick to thrillers, while Salon’s Laura Miller called some of his contentions “slippery and elusive as a handful of live minnows”. Enraged, Carr answered with an all-caps letter to the editor of Salon, in which he suggested that Miller and Kakutani should lay off military history and instead “chatter 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 posted on Amazon.com, on which he gave his book a 5-star rating.
Carr’s other books included the Sherlock Holmes novel The Italian Secretary, the historical study The Devil Soldier and a 2024 memoir that stood as his literary farewell, My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me.
From childhood, Carr was so repulsed by human behavior that he found himself identifying with cats – and becoming convinced he used to be one. Carr lived alone – or at least lived with no other people – for much of his adult life, spending his later years in a massive stone house in upstate New York made possible by royalties from The Alienist and other books, a 1,400-acre property set in the foothills of Misery Mountain.
Carr and Masha would share a home for the next 17 years, attuned to each other’s moods and even taste in music, until Masha’s death. My Beloved Monster was a kind of dual elegy. As Masha’s health began to decline, Carr had his own troubles, including neuropathy and pancreatitis, illnesses he believed stemmed from his childhood abuse. Watching Masha die, and laid inside a makeshift coffin, was like saying goodbye to his “other self”.
