| | 1 | Name: | Ms. Natalie Marie Angier | | | Institution: | The New York Times | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 502. Physicians, Theologians, Lawyers, Jurists, Architects, and Members of Other Professions | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1958 | | | | | | |
Fascinated by science since her youth and endowed with a unique facility for words, Natalie Marie Angier writes with a lucidity and enthusiasm that have identified her as a most gifted and respected science writer. A science correspondent for The New York Times since 1990, she has also written for Discover and Time magazines and worked in journalism education, most recently as a visiting professor at Cornell University. Ms. Angier has a captivating way of seducing her readers into understanding complex scientific concepts without sacrificing the truth. Her first book, Natural Obsessions, disseminated an accurate understanding of the profound significance of the oncogene concept to scientists and nonscientists alike and earned her a Pulitzer Prize. Her writing is visual and kinetic, colorful and festive, while at the same time playful and full of surprises. Each scientific story reads like an exciting novel, difficult to put down. But she combines this skill in storytelling with an originality of thinking, and the unusual capacity for synthesizing seemingly unrelated facts into original perspectives. In the essays collected in The Beauty of the Beastly, she finds poetry in the "seamy" side of nature: in parasites; in animal deceit and brutality. In Woman: An Intimate Geography, she breaks out from stereotypic views of women. In the L.A. Times, it was described as "…a classic - a text so necessary and abundant and true that all efforts of its kind, for decades before and after, will be measured by it." Ms. Angier's latest book is entitled The Canon: A Whirligig Tour Through the Beautiful Basics of Science, which "sparkles with wit and charm" and "refines everything you've ever wanted to know about science into an entertaining and accessible guide." | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Jonathan R. Cole | | | Institution: | Columbia University | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Jonathan R. Cole currently is John Mitchell Mason Professor of the University. For fourteen years, from 1989-2003, he was Provost of Columbia University, and from 1994 until 2005, he also held the title of Dean of Faculties of the University. He has spent his entire academic career at Columbia. Majoring in American history at Columbia College (graduating in 1964), he participated also as a varsity athlete in baseball for four years and as a member of Columbia's freshman basketball team while an undergraduate. He turned to sociology after graduation in large part because of the influence of Robert K. Merton. As an undergraduate he studied with some of the great minds of Columbia in the early 1960s, including Merton, Lionel Trilling, Eric Bentley, Meyer Schapiro, and Richard Hofstadter. Dr. Cole received his Ph.D., with distinction, from Columbia's Department of Sociology in 1969. He has been teaching, conducting research, and been active in academic administration since receipt of his doctorate, which was entitled, "The Social Structure of Science." He served as the Director of the Center for the Social Sciences from 1979-87, when he became Vice President for Arts and Sciences. After two years, he was named Provost of the University and in 1994 he became Provost and Dean of Faculties at Columbia, a position that he has held until today. His scholarly work has focused principally on the development of the sociology of science as a research specialty. The Columbia University Program in the Sociology of Science, with Robert K. Merton, Harriet Zuckerman, Stephen Cole and Jonathan R. Cole as principal investigators, received support from the National Science Foundation for roughly 20 years. Faculty and student members of the program produced a substantial body of both theoretical and empirical work on a variety of themes. Jonathan and Stephen Cole collaborated on studies of the system of social stratification in science and on the reward system in science. They examined the extent to which the social system of science approximated a meritocracy. This work is seen in early-published papers and in their book, Social Stratification in Science (1973). In this early work, Jonathan and Stephen Cole developed the use of citations as a measure of scientific quality and impact. They were the first social scientists to use this measure extensively as an indicator of the impact of published work. Further questions of meritocracy were explored in a project that they conducted for the National Academy of Sciences on the peer review system in science. They focused on whether there was any force to the claim that the peer review system was an "old-boys" network of self-reinforcing elites. The study, which examined the system of grant reviews at the National Science Foundation, resulted in several published works, including Peer Review in the National Science Foundation: Phase One of a Study (1978, with Stephen Cole and Leonard Rubin) and Peer Review in the National Science Foundation: Phase Two of a Study (1981, with Stephen Cole and COPUP of the NAS). Concentrating still further on theoretical issues of fairness and meritocracy, Dr. Cole began to explore the place of women in science. His early work, Fair Science: Women in the Scientific Community (1987) was one of the first major empirical works on the treatment of women in science and how their treatment could be assessed against the norm of universalism in science. Following the publication of this book, a series of studies of women in science were carried out in collaboration with Harriet Zuckerman. This NSF supported work, which produced extended interviews with hundreds of men and women scientists (including recorded interviews with scores of many of the most eminent female scientists in the United States), resulted in many published papers and the volume The Outer Circle: Women in the Scientific Community (1991, with Harriet Zuckerman and John Bruer, editors). These papers explored, for example, the relationship between marriage, family, and scientific productivity. It tried to explain the "productivity puzzle" of increasing differences in the scientific publication rates of men and women scientists. It compares the careers and scientific productivity of matched samples of men and women in various fields of science. The last of these papers, "A Theory of Limited Differences: Explaining the Productivity Puzzle in Science," (with Burton Singer) is published in The Outer Circle. Dr. Cole's interest in science has extended to work on the relationship between science and the media. He has published on the "social construction of medical facts," which deal with the presentation by journalists of highly problematic scientific findings as "facts." His focus is on the sociological relationships between scientists and the media that lead to these distortions. In recent years, Jonathan R. Cole has turned his scholarly attention to issues in higher education, particularly focusing on problems facing the great American research universities, as with his 2010 book, The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected. His edited book (with Elinor Barber and Stephen R. Graubard), The Research University in a Time of Discontent (1994), contains essays by prominent educators, including his own opening chapter, "Balancing Acts: Dilemmas of Choice Facing Research Universities." More recently, he has been focusing attention on questions of scientific and technological literacy, on intellectual property and the new digital media, and on current problems facing research universities. Jonathan R. Cole has taught courses to both undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia in the Department of Sociology. Among the courses he has offered are: The History of Sociological Theory; The Sociology of Science; The Sociology of Law; and Evidence and Inference in Social Research. He has also taught in Columbia College's core curriculum, offering sections in "Contemporary Civilization." He is currently working with members of the science faculty at Columbia on a new core curriculum course that focuses on major science concepts, while exploring features of various scientific disciplines. When it is introduced, this course will be required of all Columbia College undergraduates and will be the first science course that all College students will be required to take. Jonathan Cole was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1975-76. In the same year, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He spent the 1986-87 academic year as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. In 1992, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and several major foundations have supported his scholarly work. The years since 1987 have been spent in academic administration. After two years as Vice President for Arts and Sciences, Jonathan R. Cole was Columbia's chief academic officer for the past 14 years - the second longest tenure as Provost in the University's 250-year history. During those years, he has served three University presidents and has been a chief architect in building still further the academic quality of the university. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Amy Gutmann | | | Institution: | U.S. State Department; University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Amy Gutmann is a political philosopher, widely recognized for her work linking theory to practice in the core values of democratic civil society. In 2022 she became the U.S. Ambassador to Germany. From 2004-2022 she served as the eighth president of the University of Pennsylvania, where she also held the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science chair in the School of Arts and Sciences, along with secondary faculty appointments in Philosophy, the Annenberg School for Communication, and the Graduate School of Education. Dr. Gutmann has published widely on the value of education and deliberation in democracy, on the importance of access to higher education and health care, on "the good, the bad and the ugly" of identity politics, and on the essential role of ethics -especially professional and political ethics - in public affairs. She continued to be an active scholar as Penn's President, most recently lecturing on "What Makes a University Education Worthwhile?" and publishing her sixteenth book, The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It (with Dennis Thompson) in May 2012. During her term as university president she became a national leader in the push to facilitate broader access to higher education, making Penn the largest university to establish a no-loan guarantee that has become a national model, and significantly expanding the number of low-income students attending the University.
Born in Brooklyn, New York to immigrant parents, Dr. Gutmann graduated magna cum laude from Harvard-Radcliffe College. She earned her master's degree in Political Science from the London School of Economics and her doctorate in Political Science from Harvard University. Prior to her appointment as Penn's president, she served as provost at Princeton University, where she was also the founding director of the University Center for Human Values. She served as Princeton's dean of the faculty from 1995-97 and as academic advisor to the President from 1997-98. In 2000, she was awarded the President's Distinguished Teaching Award by Princeton University. She won the Harvard University Centennial Medal (2003), the Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Award (2009), and was named by Newsweek one of the "150 Women Who Shake the World" (2011). She is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, is a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and served as president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. Dr. Gutmann is a founding member of the Global Colloquium of the University Presidents, which advises the Secretary General of the U.N. on a range of issues, including the social responsibility of universities. In 2009, President Obama appointed her chair of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She is married to Michael W.Doyle, the Harold Brown Professor of Law and International Affairs at Columbia University. Their daughter, Abigail Gutmann Doyle, is an assistant professor of Chemistry at Princeton University. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. John C. Van Horne | | | Institution: | The Library Company of Philadelphia | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1950 | | | | | | |
John C. Van Horne, a native of Illinois, graduated from Princeton University and received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia in 1979. He held a fellowship (1975-76) with The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, a multi-volume edition of the writings and drawings of America's first professional architect and engineer. The project was headquartered at the Maryland Historical Society under the direction of Editor in Chief Edward C. Carter II. Following the year-long fellowship, Dr. Van Horne stayed on with the Latrobe Papers, rising through the ranks to eventually become Editor. When Carter was appointed Librarian of the American Philosophical Society in 1980, Dr. Van Horne moved with the project to new quarters in Library Hall. In 1985 he took up his post as Director of the Library Company of Philadelphia, succeeding APS Member Edwin Wolf 2nd, who had led the Library Company for thirty years. For twenty-nine years Dr. Van Horne guided the fortunes of this institution that, like the APS itself, is so closely associated with Benjamin Franklin. Founded by Franklin in 1731 as the first American subscription library, the Library Company is today an independent research library with extensive collections of rare books documenting all aspects of American history through the end of the 19th century. Significant accomplishments during Van Horne's tenure include creating a research fellowship program; creating an online public access catalog; renovating a neighboring historic townhouse as a residential research center; establishing special programs relating to early American economic history, African American history, visual culture, and women’s history; and building the collections through major acquisitions. He retired from the Library Company in 2014 and is now Director Emeritus. Dr. Van Horne’s publications include many volumes of the Latrobe Papers and other edited works such as Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery: The American Correspondence of the Associates of Dr. Bray, 1717-1777 (1985); The Letter Book of James Abercromby, Colonial Agent, 1751-1773 (1991); The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America (1994); Traveling the Pennsylvania Railroad: The Photographs of William H. Rau (2002); and America's Curious Botanist: A Tercentennial Reappraisal of John Bartram (1699-1777) (published by APS in 2004). Van Horne currently chairs the Administrative Board of the The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (co-sponsored by Yale University and APS) and serves on the Board of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine (formerly the Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science); the Committee on Library of the American Philosophical Society; and the Academic Affairs Committee of Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. He is Chair of the Victorian Society Scholarship Fund and has previously served on the boards of the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, the National Humanities Alliance, and the Abraham Lincoln Foundation of the Union League of Philadelphia. In 2017 he received the Heritage Award of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Dr. Van Horne lives in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania with his wife Christine. | |
| 5 | Name: | Mr. Walter Isaacson | | | Institution: | The Aspen Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Walter Isaacson is the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute. He has been the Chairman and CEO of CNN and the editor of Time Magazine. He is the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Steve Jobs (2011), and Leonardo da Vinci (2017) and is the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986). Isaacson was born on May 20, 1952, in New Orleans. He is a graduate of Harvard College and of Pembroke College of Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He began his career at the Sunday Times of London and then the New Orleans Times-Picayune/States-Item. He joined Time Magazine in 1978 and served as a political correspondent, national editor and editor of new media before becoming the magazine's 14th managing editor in in 1996. He became Chairman and CEO of CNN in 2001, and then president and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he was appointed by Governor Kathleen Blanco to be the vice-chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. In December 2007, he was appointed by President George W. Bush to be the chairman of the U.S.-Palestinian Partnership, a government and private sector effort to provide economic and educational opportunities for the Palestinian people. He is the Chairman of the Board of Teach for America, and he is on the boards of United Airlines, Tulane University, and Science Service. He is also on the advisory councils of the National Institutes of Health, the National Constitution Center, and the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. He lives with his wife and daughter in Washington, DC. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2005. | |
| 6 | Name: | Prof. Dr. Reinhard Kurth | | | Institution: | Ernst Schering Foundation; Robert Koch Institute; Humboldt University | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | Death Date: | February 2, 2014 | | | | | | |
The virologist and clinician Reinhard Kurth was born in 1942 in Dresden, Germany. At his death on February 2, 2014, he was the Chairman of the Foundation Council at the Ernst Schering Foundation. He was President Emeritus of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, where he had also a postdoctoral fellow in the virology department from 1971-73. After a further two years as head of his own group at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories in London, he led a junior research group at the Max Planck Society in Tübingen, Germany, from 1975-80. In 1980 he became Head of the Virology Department of the Paul Ehrlich Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1986 he was appointed director of that institute, a post he held until 1999 and during the last three years of which he was simultaneously director of the Robert Koch Institute. From September 2004 he also held the post of Acting Director of the Federal Institute for Drugs and Medicinal Products in Bonn. The focus of Reinhard Kurth's scientific work has long been the retroviruses. Various aspects of all three existing retroviral families have been investigated by him: the Human Immunodeficiency Viruses (HIV), the Human T-Lymphotropic Viruses (HTLV) that can cause a particular form of leukemia, and the Human Endogenous Retroviruses (HERV), viruses that have become integrated into the human genome during the course of evolution and, like other genes, are passed from generation to generation. His focus was on the mechanisms of pathogenesis of HIV and SIV infections, the development of an AIDS vaccine, and the genomic organization and pathophysiology of HERVs. Reinhard Kurth, who after being licensed as a physician in 1969 moved into research, was the recipient of many scientific awards. In 1998 he was appointed a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science in recognition of his scientific achievements. He was elected an International member of the American Philosophical Society in 2005. In 2008 he was elected to the newly established German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He authored over 330 publications, among them approximately 60 reviews and contributions to books. He has delivered more than 500 external seminars, many abroad. One aim of his public activities was to enable opinion-makers and laypersons to make informed decisions in biomedical issues. It was also an important concern of his to make clear the importance of science as an investment in the future. His multidisciplinary communication activities, in addition to his public presentations, consisted of numerous contributions and interviews on radio and television and in newspapers and magazines. Dr. Kurth presented advances in infection research in the context of other social, ethical and political questions, for example by promoting the support for disease prevention in developing countries. As a member of the German Section of the Africa Commission and as personal representative of the German Chancellor in the Task Force Initiative against the spread of infectious diseases in the Baltic Sea States, he also strove to implement these demands in a practical way. Dr. Kurth was the principal advisor of the German Federal Government on biomedical issues. He was a much sought after discussant with the German Secretary of Health and Social Security and was regularly asked to appear in the German Parliament in a number of committees. The German Chancellor regularly asked for his opinion on biomedical issues, including aspects of bioterrorism. Reinhard Kurth was married and had two grown-up children. His wife Bärbel-Maria Kurth was also his closest companion. | |
| 7 | Name: | Mr. Anthony Lewis | | | Institution: | New York Review of Books; The New York Times | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 502. Physicians, Theologians, Lawyers, Jurists, Architects, and Members of Other Professions | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1927 | | | Death Date: | March 25, 2013 | | | | | | |
Anthony Lewis was a columnist for the New York Times from 1969 to 2001. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize. In 2001 he was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal and in 2009 he was awarded the Burton Benjamin Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
He was born in New York City on March 27, 1927. He attended Horace Mann School in New York City and Harvard College, receiving a B.A. in 1948.
From 1948 to 1952 he was a deskman in the Sunday Department of The Times. In 1952 he became a reporter for the Washington Daily News. In 1955 he won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series of articles in the Washington Daily News on the dismissal of a Navy employee as a security risk. The articles led to the employee's reinstatement.
In 1955 Mr. Lewis joined the Washington Bureau of the New York Times. In 1956-57 he was a Nieman Fellow; he spent the academic year studying at Harvard Law School. Upon his return to Washington, he covered the Supreme Court, the Justice Department and other legal matters including the government's handling of the civil rights movement, for the New York Times. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Supreme Court in 1963.
He became Chief of the Times London Bureau in 1964. He began writing his column from London in 1969. Since 1973 he has been located in Boston. He traveled frequently, in this country and abroad.
He is the author of four books: Gideon's Trumpet, about a landmark Supreme Court case; Portrait of a Decade, about the great changes in American race relations; Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment; and Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment.
Mr. Lewis was for fifteen years a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, teaching a course on the Constitution and the press. He has taught at a number of other universities as a visitor, among them the Universities of California, Illinois, Oregon and Arizona. Since 1983 he has held the James Madison Visiting Professorship at Columbia University.
Anthony Lewis died on March 25, 2013, at the age of 85 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was married to Margaret H. Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. | |
| 8 | Name: | Mr. Paul F. Miller | | | Institution: | Pew Charitable Trusts; Squam Lakes Natural Science Center; Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; University of Pennsylvania | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1927 | | | Death Date: | September 9, 2017 | | | | | | |
Paul F. Miller, Jr. started his career in 1950 with the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and then joined the investment banking firm of Drexel & Co., where he became a partner, then president of a successor firm, Drexel Harriman Ripley. In 1969, he founded the investment management firm of Miller, Anderson & Sherrerd where he stayed until his retirement in 1991. He became a partner of Miller Associates, private investors, and a limited partner of Miller Investment Management. He was a trustee emeritus and former chairman of the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, and a former trustee of the Ford Foundation. Mr. Miller was a senior trustee of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, and a trustee of the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center. He was a past director of the Pew Charitable Trusts, the World Wildlife Fund, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and the Appalachian Mountain Club. Also, he was a retired director of Hewlett-Packard Company, the Mead Corporation, and Rohm and Haas Company. Mr. Miller was a 1950 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and received honorary degrees from both the University of Pennsylvania and Washington and Lee University. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2005. Paul F. Miller died September 9, 2017, at the age of 90. | |
| 9 | Name: | Dr. Gordon E. Moore | | | Institution: | Intel Corporation | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | Death Date: | March 24, 2023 | | | | | | |
Gordon E. Moore is retired chairman of Intel Corporation. He co-founded Intel in 1968, serving initially as Executive Vice President before becoming President and Chief Executive Officer in 1979. He remained CEO until 1987 and was named Chairman Emeritus in 1997. Dr. Moore is widely known for "Moore's Law," in which in 1965 he predicted that the number of components the industry would be able to place on a computer chip would double every year. In 1975, he updated his prediction to once every two years. It has become the guiding principle for the semiconductor industry to deliver ever-more-powerful chips while decreasing the cost of electronics. Dr. Moore earned a B.S. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics from California Institute of Technology. He is a director of Gilead Sciences, Inc., a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Engineers. Dr. Moore also serves on the Board of Trustees of the California Institute of Technology. He received the National Medal of Technology from President George Bush in 1990 and the Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush in 2002. | |
| 10 | Name: | Professor John Edgar Wideman | | | Institution: | Brown University | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | | | Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
The author of twenty novels, over fifty short stories and numerous essays on literary theory and criticism, John Wideman received the 1996 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical writing. He is a two-time winner of the PEN-Faulkner Award (the only person to have done so twice) for his books Philadelphia Fire (1990) and Sent for You Yesterday (1983). His story "Weight" received the 2000 O. Henry Award for best short story, and the essay "Whose War" was included in The Best American Essays of 2003. His other prizes include a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Grant, the Rea Prize for short fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award for fiction, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences' Katherine Anne Porter Award in Literature. Mr. Wideman is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and has served on the faculties of the University of Pennsylvania (1967-74), the University of Wyoming (1974-86), the University of Massachusetts (1986-2004) and Brown University (2004-), where he is Asa Messer Professor and Professor of Africana Studies and English. A graduate of Oxford University's New College (B.Ph., 1966), he was the second African American to receive a Rhodes Scholarship. His novel, Fanon (2008), is a part fictional, part biographical account tracing the life, message and legacy of Martiniquean revolutionary Frantz Fanon. He recently published a collection of short stories called American Histories (2018). | |
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