Author Bios

Caroline Fraser is an American author and literary journalist whose work has addressed two very different but equally consequential subjects: the history and practices of Christian Science, and the life and legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder. In both cases, she brought to her subjects the qualities that define the best contemporary nonfiction — thorough archival…

John Lewis was one of the most consequential figures in American political and moral life of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a civil rights leader and United States Congressman from Georgia whose life embodied the principle of what he called “good trouble” — the courageous disruption of unjust order in service of human dignity and…

John Bailey was a British literary critic and academic whose career represented one of the last expressions of a particular tradition in English letters: the man of letters who wrote about literature not as a professional academic exercise but as an act of sustained personal engagement and passionate advocacy. Born in 1931 in Nottingham, he…

Peter Stark is an American adventure journalist and historian whose work occupies the demanding territory between immersive narrative nonfiction and serious historical scholarship. A longtime contributor to Outside magazine and The New Yorker, Stark writes about exploration, wilderness, and the history of human engagement with extreme environments with a combination of physical authority — he…

Stephen Ambrose was the most widely read American popular historian of the late twentieth century, an author whose gift for narrative storytelling and whose ability to make the large-scale dramas of American military and political history vivid and accessible to millions of general readers transformed the market for popular history. Born in 1936 in Decatur,…

Rebecca Skloot is an American science journalist and author whose single published book has become one of the most influential works of narrative nonfiction of the twenty-first century, a landmark in the literature of science, race, medicine, and American history. Born in 1972 in Springfield, Ohio, and raised in a family that valued both science…

Jon Krakauer is the dominant figure in American adventure and narrative nonfiction writing of the past thirty years, an author whose work combines first-person immersion in extreme physical experience with the rigorous research and moral seriousness of the finest journalism. Born in 1954 in Brookline, Massachusetts, and raised in Corvallis, Oregon, he developed a passion…

Audrey Magee is an Irish novelist whose work engages with the deep history and unresolved trauma of twentieth-century Europe, approaching questions of violence, colonialism, and human cruelty through formally inventive fiction that refuses the consolations of conventional narrative. Born in Ireland in 1966, she spent years working as a journalist, including postings in Moscow and…

Louise Erdrich is one of the most significant American novelists of the past half century, a writer whose work has reshaped the landscape of American literature by placing Native American experience — specifically the history and contemporary life of Ojibwe and other Plains communities — at the center of an epic, multigenerational fictional project of…

Rosalie Knecht is an American novelist and translator whose work brings together literary precision, genre intelligence, and a quietly radical social consciousness. She is the author of the Vera Kelly series of crime novels, which follows a bisexual, working-class private investigator navigating the political upheavals and social margins of mid-twentieth-century America, and of stand-alone literary…