Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, Harvard College Professor, and chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program.  She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her landmark biography of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister will be published in 2013.  Her previous books include The Mansion of Happiness:  A History of Life and Death (2012); The Whites of Their Eyes (2010), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; New York Burning (2005), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best non-fiction book on race, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War (1998), winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, and the Berkshire Prize and a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Award; and Blindspot (2008), a novel written jointly with Jane Kamensky, also a Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her next book, The Story of America: Essays on Origins, will be published in October of 2012.