About Thomas Mallon
Thomas Mallon (born November 2, 1951) is an American novelist, essayist, and critic. He is the author of ten books of fiction, including Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, Bandbox, Fellow Travelers (adapted into a miniseries by the same name), Watergate, Finale, Landfall, and most recently Up With the Sun. He has also published nonfiction on plagiarism (Stolen Words), diaries (A Book of One's Own), letters (Yours Ever) and the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Mrs. Paine's Garage), as well as two volumes of essays (Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact). He is a former literary editor of GQ, where he wrote the "Doubting Thomas" column in the 1990s, and has contributed frequently to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, and other periodicals. He was appointed a member of the National Council on the Humanities in 2002 and served as Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2005 to 2006. His honors include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the National Book Critics Circle citation for reviewing, and the Vursell Memorial Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for distinguished prose style. He was elected as a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. A Book of One's Own, an informal guide to the great diaries of literature, was published in 1984 and gave Mallon his first measure of critical acclaim. He explained his enthusiasm for the genre by saying: "Writing books is too good an idea to be left to authors." The success of A Book of One's Own won Mallon a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1986. Mallon published his first novel, Arts and Sciences, in 1988 about Arthur Dunne, a 22-year-old Harvard University graduate student in English. He has also published nonfiction on plagiarism, diaries, letters and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as well as two volumes of essays.
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