Meanwhile he had begun establishing what became a successful career as a magazine writer and editor. His first novel, CAUGHT IN A STILL PLACE, was published in 1989. "When I stopped trying to be a full-time revolutionary, in the mid-seventies, I embraced my calling to be a full-time writer," Lerner says. These experiences-and the challenges of being a young man struggling with his gay identity in a macho group culture-informed both Lerner's novel ALEX UNDERGROUND and his memoir SWORDS IN THE HANDS OF CHILDREN. That became the clandestine and cult-like Weather Underground, which carried out a campaign of bombings. In 1969 he helped found the breakaway SDS faction the Weatherman. His early writing experiences were producing SDS publications and contributing to other counterculture and "underground" newspapers. Lerner matriculated at Antioch College in 1965, but dropped out two years later and immersed himself in New Left activism, joining the staff of Students for a Democratic Society. It was also the germ for his new novel LILY NARCISSUS. That experience, and the journeys there and back which took his family literally around the world, primed a lifelong addiction to travel. Jonathan Lerner, born in 1948, grew up in Washington, D.C., with the exception of two years in the late fifties when his father, a Foreign Service officer, was posted to Taipei.
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