During the school year 1945/46, Begley attended the Jan Sobieski school in Kraków. It was his first experience of formal instruction since kindergarten during the Soviet occupation of Stryi, which followed the German invasion of western Poland in 1939.

In 1956, Begley married Sally Higginson (1928-2017). They divorced in May 1970. In March 1974, Begley married his present wife, Anka Muhlstein, a historian and biographer born in Paris. Begley has three children: painter and sculptor Peter Begley, writer Adam Begley, and novelist and art historian Amey Larmore (who writes under the pen name Laura Moore) He also has two stepsons from Muhlstein’s previous marriage: Robert Dujarric, the director of the Institute for Contemporary Japanese Studies at Temple University Japan Campus in Tokyo, and Stephane Dujarric, the chief spokesman for United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.

In 1956 Begley entered Harvard Law School. Upon his graduation in 1959 (LL.B. magna cum laude), he joined the New York firm now known as Debevoise & Plimpton as an associate. He became a partner January 1, 1968, while serving at the newly established Paris office. Upon his return to New York, Begley headed the firm’s international practice for many years, his work being concentrated on large projects in Australia, Algeria, Latin America, Canada and Europe, for Japanese, European and Brazilian as well as American clients. He retired from the firm on January 1, 2004.

Begley’s first novel, Wartime Lies, was based on his childhood as a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi death camps. It won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1991 and the Prix Médicis étranger in 1992. There have been attempts to adapt it into a film by Stanley Kubrick and William Monahan, but this has not come to fruition to date.

From 1993 to 1995, Begley was president of PEN American Center. He served on PEN’s board of directors from 1992-2001.

Begley’s 1996 novel About Schmidt was the basis for the eponymous 2002 film by Alexander Payne. Payne made many changes from the book, though Begley commented in an essay in The New York Times that “my most important themes were treated with great intelligence and sensitivity” and felt the movie was “a gem of original filmmaking.”

In 2001, a selection of Begley’s essays and journalistic pieces was published by Suhrkamp Verlag (Frankfurt) under the title Das Gelobte Land.

Venedig Unter Vier Augen, a book on Venetian themes by Anka Muhlstein and Louis Begley, was published in 2003 by Marebuch Verlag (Hamburg). It was also published in English in 2005 by Haus Publishing under the title Venice for Lovers, and reissued under the same title by Grove Press in the U.S..

Zwischen Fakten und Fiktionen, the text of LB’s lectures given as part of Poetik Dozentur at Heidelberg University in November 2006, was published by Suhrkamp in January 2008.

The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay was published by Atlas & Co. in 2008.

The University of Heidelberg conferred on him in 2008 the degree of D. Phil., honoris causa.

Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters was published by Yale University Press in 2009.