Joshua Prager’s journalism unravels historical secrets — and his own.
Why you should listen
Joshua Prager writes for publications including Vanity Fair, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, where he was a senior writer for eight years. George Will has described his work as "exemplary journalistic sleuthing." His most recent book is The Family Roe: An American Story, which delves into the Supreme Court’s most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart.
Prager's book 100 Years is a list of literary quotations on every age from birth to one hundred. Designed by Milton Glaser, the legendary graphic designer who created the I ♥ NY logo, the book moves year by year through the words of our most beloved authors, revealing the great sequence of life. His first book, The Echoing Green, was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. The New York Times Book Review called it "a revelation and a page turner, a group character study unequaled in baseball writing since Roger Kahn’s Boys of Summer some three decades ago." His second book, Half-Life, describes his recovery from a bus crash that broke his neck. Dr. Jerome Groopman, staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, called it "an extraordinary memoir, told with nuance and brimming with wisdom."
Prager was a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 2011 and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Hebrew University in 2012. He was born in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, grew up in New Jersey, and lives in New York.