From BookJive
|
||||
| Name: | Garry Wills | |||
| Birth: | May 22 1934 | |||
| Nationality: |
|
|||
| + add to my profile | ||||
Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934 in Atlanta, Georgia) is an author, journalist, and historian specializing in politics, ideology, and Roman Catholicism. Between 1961 and 2008 inclusive, he has written nearly 40 books. He has been a frequent reviewer for the New York Review of Books since 1973.
Biography
Wills grew up in Michigan and Wisconsin and graduated from Campion High School, a Jesuit institution, in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin in 1951. He entered and then left the Jesuit order. William F. Buckley, Jr. hired him as a drama critic for National Review magazine at the age of 23. He received his PhD in classics from Yale in 1961. Wills has been awarded the honorary degree of L.H.D. by the College of the Holy Cross (1982) and by Bates College (1995).
Ideologically, he started out his adult life as a conservative, but through the 1960s he became more and more a liberal, driven by covering the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement.
His biography of president Richard M. Nixon, Nixon Agonistes (1970) landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents.
Wills joined the faculty of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980. He is now an emeritus professor.
Children: John Wills, Garry Wills, Lydia Wills
