Arthur Golden
Arthur S. Golden is the author of Memoirs of a Geisha. Readers and critics were stunned that an American man -- a first-time novelist at that -- could so vividly create the internal life of a Japanese woman living the almost unimaginably alien and structured life of a traditional geisha in the years before and during World War II. Golden's accomplishment grew from years of painstaking research. "After six years of work and two completely separate drafts of a novel about a geisha, I passed my manuscript around and readers described it as dry. Being an analytical person, I developed a rational plan of attack. Step one: panic. Step two: figure out what went wrong. In the following week I realized I'd been afraid of the challenge I'd set, namely, to understand and describe the inner life of a fictional geisha. From fear, I'd kept a distance between myself and her. Now I could see the proper course to merge the two of us together - write the story in the first person - even if it meant thro