Luc Sante was born in Verviers, Belgium in 1954, and emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1963. He attended Columbia University and since 1984 has been a full-time writer. Luc Sante is a book critic for New York magazine, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a senior contributor to the internet magazine Slate. He has written about books, films, art, photography, and miscellaneous cultural phenomenona for many other periodicals. He received a Whiting Writer's Award in 1989, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992-93, and, in 1997, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Melissa Holbrook Pierson. He is writing a book about the picture postcard and prewar America.