Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934 in Atlanta, Georgia) is an author and historian, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books . In 1993, he won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, which describes the background and effect of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863. Wills is an adjunct professor of history, both American and cultural, at Northwestern University. He graduated from Campion High School in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin in 1951 and received his PhD in classics from Yale in 1961. William F. Buckley, Jr. hired him as a drama critic for National Review magazine at the age of 23. In 1995 Wills received a L.H.D. from Bates College. He received an honorary doctorate from the College of the Holy Cross. In 1998, he won the National Medal for the Humanities. He has also won the National Book Critics Circle Award. His book Nixon Agonistes landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents. John Leonard said in The New York Times that Wills "reads like a combination of H. L. Mencken, John Locke and Albert Camus."[1]
|