It is possible as the book series was released around 1990, and they could have met as Halperin was a professor of literature at MIT during that time period.
This is speculation at best though, and I have a feeling that digging further in to Halperin would ruin the rest of my day, so I will leave it at that.
The character is eventually brutally murdered so it could easily have been the author signalling against something he couldn't talk about openly.
It is possible as the book series was released around 1990, and they could have met as Halperin was a professor of literature at MIT during that time period.
This is speculation at best though, and I have a feeling that digging further in to Halperin would ruin the rest of my day, so I will leave it at that.
Yeah I'm not going to go digging on that either tbh. He gets put in the wood chipper box.