Leonard Michaels (January 2, 1933 - May 10, 2003) was a famed American writer of short stories, novels, and essays. I Would Have Saved Them If I Could was his second collection of short stories, originally published in 1975. "Leonard Michaels' stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries - Grace Paley and Philip Roth." - Mona Simpson, The New York Times Book Review "Leonard Michaels was an original... with a concise, pungent and pyrotechnic style that tolerated no flab." - Phillip Lopate, The Nation "As good as any writer you're likely to run across." - Alex Abramovich, Bookforum
Author
Leonard Michaels was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays and a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Going Places, his first book of short stories, made his reputation as one of the most brilliant of that era's fiction writers; the stories are urban, funny, and written in a private, hectic diction that gives them a remarkable edge. The follow-up, coming six years later (Michaels was perhaps not prolific enough to build a widely popular career), was I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, a collection as strong as the first.
