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 throwing everything away and starting over. It was the most difficult moment of my career."

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Golden received a degree in art history from Harvard College, where he specialized in Japanese art, and a master's in Japanese history from Columbia University, where he also learned Mandarin Chinese. He spent a summer at Beijing University andrick then worked in Tokyo, where he became intrigued by the story of an acquaintance whose mother had been a geisha before her marriage. Golden returned to the United States and earned a master's in English from Boston University, but the young man's story, and his mother's, still preoccupied him, and he began work on a novel.

When Golden first made up his mind to write a novel about a geisha, he read everything he could find on the subject, in English and in Japanese. After he had completed an 800-page draft of his novel, a longtime friend of his grandmother's introduced Golden to an actual retired geisha who was willing to discuss her past. He interviewed her at length, and when he was done, he threw away his manuscript and began again from scratch. His second draft attracted initial interest, but no publishers. It was only then, six years into his project, that Golden rewrote his story from the point of view of the woman herself. The resulting book spent more than a year on the New York Times best-seller list; its dramatic plot and vivid characters evoked comparisons with Dickens.

Arthur Golden lives with his wife and two children in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he is now at work on a new book. In 2005, Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment released the film version of Memoirs of a Geisha.