Samuel Astrachan wrote his first novel, An End to Dying (1958), at the
age of 19, during his junior and senior years at Columbia College,
while supporting himself as a delivery boy in a liquor store and
working as Editor in Chief of The Columbia Review. Telling the story of
a family of Russian Jews, the Kagans (his mother's maiden name), five
of whom move to New York and change their name to Cohen, the book was
published in April, 1956, when Astrachan was 21. After graduating, he
traveled to Italy, where he worked on his second novel, The Game of
Dostoevsky (1965).