Garry Wills

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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^[1] 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, entered and then left the Jesuit order, 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 1982 Wills received an L.H.D. from the College of the Holy Cross and an L.H.D. from Bates College in 1995.

In 1998, he won the National Medal for the Humanities. He was a co-winner in 1978 of the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction for his book Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.

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]

[edit] Books

Chesterton: Man and Mask, Doubleday, 1961. ISBN 978-0-385-50290-0
Animals of the Bible (1962)
Politics and Catholic Freedom (1964)
Roman Culture: Weapons and the Man (1966), ISBN 0-8076-0367-8
The Second Civil War: Arming for Armageddon (1968)
Jack Ruby (1968), ISBN 0-306-80564-2
Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-made Man (1970, 1979), ISBN 0-451-61750-9
Bare Ruined Choirs: Doubt, Prophecy, and Radical Religion (1972), ISBN 0-385-08970-8
Values Americans Live By (1973), ISBN 0-405-04166-7
Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1978), ISBN 0-385-08976-7
Confessions of a Conservative (1979), ISBN 0-385-08977-5
At Button's (1979), ISBN 0-8362-6108-9
Explaining America: The Federalist (1981), ISBN 0-385-14689-2
The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (1982), ISBN 0-316-94385-1
Lead Time: A Journalist's Education (1983), ISBN 0-385-17695-3
Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (1984), ISBN 0-385-17562-0
Reagan's America: Innocents at Home (1987), ISBN 0-385-18286-4
Under God: Religion and American Politics (1990), ISBN 0-671-65705-4
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992), ISBN 0-671-76956-1
Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders (1994), ISBN 0-671-65702-X
Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth (1995), ISBN 0-19-508879-4
John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity (1997), ISBN 0-684-80823-4
Saint Augustine (1999), ISBN 0-670-88610-6
A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (1999), ISBN 0-684-84489-3
Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (2000), ISBN 0-385-49410-6
Venice: Lion City: The Religion of Empire (2001), ISBN 0-684-87190-4
Why I Am a Catholic (2002), ISBN 0-618-13429-8
Mr. Jefferson's University (2002), ISBN 0-7922-6531-9
James Madison (2002), ISBN 0-8050-6905-4
Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (2003), ISBN 0-618-34398-9
Henry Adams and the Making of America (2005), ISBN 0-618-13430-1
The Rosary: Prayer Comes Round (2005), ISBN 0-670-03449-5
What Jesus Meant (2006), ISBN 0-670-03496-7
What Paul Meant (2006), ISBN 0-670-03793-1
Head and Heart: American Christianities (2007), ISBN 978-1594201462
What the Gospels Meant (2008), ISBN 978-0-0670-01871-0