About the Narrators
David McCullough (1933-2022), acclaimed historian and #1 New York Times bestselling author, twice won the Pulitzer Prize, for Truman and John Adams, and twice received the National Book Award, for The Path between the Seas and Mornings on Horseback. His other acclaimed books are 1776, Brave Companions, The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, The Greater Journey, and The Wright Brothers. He was awarded numerous honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, and more than forty honorary degrees. In 1995, the National Book Foundation conferred on him its lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Ron Chernow’s first book, The House of Morgan, won the National Book Award and the Ambassador Award for his contribution to the study of American culture. Washington: A Life won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and Alexander Hamilton was the inspiration for the Broadway musical. The Warburgs won the Eccles Prize for Excellence in Economic Writing in 1993 and was also selected by the American Library Association as one of that year’s best nonfiction books.
Jean Edward Smith is an acclaimed biographer and university professor. Named “Today’s foremost biographer of formidable figures in American history” by George Will, he has written biographies on a number of prominent figures in US history. His work has earned him many awards and accolades; his biography of Ulysses S. Grant was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002, and his biography on President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Eisenhower in War and Peace, was a New York Times bestseller. Currently, Smith is the John Marshall Professor of Political Science at Marshall University; he also taught previously at the University of Toronto as a professor of political economy for 35 years.
H. W. Brands has written more than a dozen biographies and histories, including the The General vs. the President, a New York Times bestseller. Two of his biographies, The First American and Traitor to His Class, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. He holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin.
Walter Isaacson is the author of highly acclaimed works of nonfiction, including several biographies that have made the #1 spot on the New York Times bestsellers list. A professor of history at Tulane University, he has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.
Bob Woodward is an associate editor at the Washington Post where he has worked for forty-nine years and reported on every American president from Nixon to Trump. He has shared in two Pulitzer Prizes, first for the Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, and second twenty years later as the lead Post reporter for coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of acclaimed works of nonfiction and winner of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in history, the Lincoln Prize, and the Carnegie Medal. She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Colby College and was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. She earned a PhD in government from Harvard University, where she taught government, including a course on the American presidency, and, at the age of twenty-four became a White House Fellow, working directly with President Lyndon Johnson. She served as an assistant to President Johnson in his last year in the White House and later assisted him in the preparation of his memoirs. She has been awarded many honors and accolades, including book prizes and honorary degrees.
Taylor Branch is an acclaimed author and public speaker best known for his landmark narrative history of the civil rights era, America in the King Years. The trilogy’s first book, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, won the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards in 1989. Two successive volumes also gained critical and popular success: Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65 and At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968. Decades later, all three books remain in demand. Branch began his career in 1970 as a staff journalist for the Washington Monthly, Harper’s, and, Esquire. He holds honorary doctoral degrees from ten colleges and universities. Other citations include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008 and the National Humanities Medal in 1999.
Cokie Roberts (1943–2019) was an American journalist, a political commentator, senior news analyst, and bestselling author. She had been cited as one of the fifty greatest women in the history of broadcasting by the American Women in Radio and Television.She won the Edward R. Murrow Award, the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for coverage of Congress, and a 1991 Emmy Award for her contribution to Who Is Ross Perot? In 2000, she won the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism. She and her mother, Lindy, won the Foremother Award from the National Center for Health Research in 2013. She was inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame in 2000.
Jay Winik is the author of the New York Times bestseller April 1865, among other works. He is a senior scholar of history and public policy at the University of Maryland and a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Andrew
Scott Berg is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American biographer. After graduating
from Princeton University in 1971, he expanded his senior thesis on editor
Maxwell Perkins into a full-length biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius,
which won a National Book Award. His third book, a highly anticipated biography
of aviator Charles Lindbergh, was published in 1998 and became a New York Times
bestseller, and won the Pulitzer Prize for a biography.