Ariel Horn

Ariel Horn Levenson is an American novelist and teacher. She is known for turning her job-finding difficulties as a new college graduate into a humorous novel: Help Wanted, Desperately.

Biography

Horn grew up in the Short Hills section of Millburn, New Jersey, and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a columnist for the Daily Pennsylvanian. She holds a Master of Arts degree in English from New York University. Horn has taught English at the Dalton School on Manhattan's Upper East Side, at the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy, and at a public charter school in upper Manhattan. Horn’s sister, Dara Horn is also a novelist.

Help Wanted, Desperately

In the spring of 2002 Horn was in her final year at the University of Pennsylvania and seeking an entry-level, post-graduation job in the midst of an economic downturn that had produced a very tight job market.

Help Wanted, Desperately, follows a thinly fictionalized version of Horn, Alexa Hoffman, through "a roller coaster ride of job interviews" as a college senior. Her plan is to avoid going home to Short Hills, New Jersey after graduation at any cost. Her Plan B if all else fails is to go teach English on the Pacific island of Majuro. The novel "hilariously chronicle(s)" a series of job interviews that include earthworm breeder, Broadway actress, and deodorant sniffer. The novel was published by Harper Collins in 2004. Booklist wrote that Horn used her "own job-interviewing experiences for comic effect."