About Nathaniel Tarn
Nathaniel Tarn (June 30, 1928 – June 26, 2024) was a French-American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator. He was born Edward Michael Mendelson in Paris, France, to a French-Romanian mother and a British-Lithuanian father. Tarn lived in Paris until the age of seven, then in Belgium until the age of 11; when World War II began, the family moved to England. He emigrated to the United States in 1970 and taught at several American universities, primarily Rutgers, where he was a professor from 1972 until 1985. He lived outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, after his retirement from Rutgers. == Education == Tarn was educated at Lycée d'Anvers and Clifton College and graduated with degrees in history and English from King's College, Cambridge. He returned to Paris and, after some journalism and radio work, discovered anthropology at the Musée de l'Homme, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the Collège de France. A Smith-Mundt-Fulbright grant took him to the University of Chicago; he did fieldwork for his doctorate in anthropology with the Highlands Maya of Guatemala. == Career == In 1958, a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation administered by the Royal Institute of International Affairs sent him to Burma for 18 months, after which he became an instructor at London School of Economics and then lecturer in Southeast Asian Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. Even after moving primarily to literature, he continued to write and publish anthropological work on the Highland Maya and on the sociology of Buddhist institutions, as E. Michael Mendelson.
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