Born January 3, 1954, Erik Larson is a journalist and author of several nonfiction books, six of which became New York Times bestsellers. Erik’s latest works, The Splendid and the Vile and Dead Wake, hit no. 1 on the list soon after launch.
Erik’s recent release, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, examines how Winston Churchill and his “Secret Circle” went about surviving the German air campaign of 1940-41.
Larson was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Freeport, Long Island, New York. He studied Russian history, language, and culture at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated summa cum laude in 1976. Erik attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, graduating in 1978. After seeing the movie All the President’s Men, he was inspired to go into journalism.
After a brief stint at the Bucks County Courier Times, Erik became a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and later a contributing writer for Time Magazine. His magazine stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and other publications.
He has taught non-fiction writing at San Francisco State, the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, the University of Oregon, and the Chuckanut Writers Conference in Bellingham, Wash., and has spoken to audiences from coast to coast. A former resident of Seattle, he now lives in Manhattan with his wife, a neonatologist, who is also the author of the non-fiction memoir, Almost Home, which, as Erik puts it, “could make a stone cry.” They have three daughters in far-flung locations and professions. Their beloved dog Molly resides in an urn on a shelf overlooking Central Park, where they like to think she now spends most of her time.
