Garry Wills

Garry Wills
Born	May 22, 1934 (1934-05-22) Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Occupation	Author, journalist, historian
Education	Xavier University (M.A., 1958) Yale University (Ph.D., 1961)
Alma mater	Saint Louis University (B.A., 1957)
Period	1961-present
Subjects	American politics and political history, the Roman Catholic Church
Notable work(s)	Nixon Agonistes (1970), Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1978), Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1993)
Notable award(s)	Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (1993). National Medal for the Humanities (1998)

Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning and prolific author, journalist, and historian, specializing in American politics and political history and the Roman Catholic Church. He has a PhD in classics. He has written nearly 40 books and since 1973 has been a frequent reviewer for the New York Review of Books.

Starting as a conservative and early protégé of William F. Buckley, Jr, Wills became increasingly liberal through the 1960s, driven by his coverage of the civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements. Although a practicing Catholic, he has been an excoriating critic of the Vatican and its policies and theology, such as those criticized as part of the Mater si, magistra no challenge. Wills feels that while the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States protects free speech, the Second Amendment does not protect the right to keep and bear arms.

Life and career

Wills was born in Atlanta, Georgia and grew up in Michigan and Wisconsin, graduating from Campion High School, a Jesuit institution, in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin in 1951. He entered and then left the Jesuit order. He earned a B.A. from Saint Louis University in 1957 and an M.A. from Xavier University in 1958. 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 University in 1961, and taught history at Johns Hopkins University from 1962 to 1980. He is proficient in Greek and Latin.

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. When he first became involved with National Review he did not know if he was a conservative, calling himself a "distributionist."

His biography of president Richard M. Nixon, Nixon Agonistes (1970) landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents.^{[citation needed]}

Wills joined the faculty of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is currently an emeritus professor. His home in Evanston, Illinois is "filled with books", with a converted bedroom dedicated to English literature, another containing Latin literature and books on American political thought, one hallway full of books on economics and religion, "including four shelves on St. Augustine", and another with shelves of Greek literature and philosophy.

He has three children: John Wills, Garry Wills, and Lydia Wills.^{[citation needed]}

Pius IX controversy

In 2000, Wills wrote Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, a work critical of the papacy of Pius IX at a time when the Pope was being scheduled for beatification. Wills was also critical of the papacy of Pius XII; his criticisms were denounced as unfair by Rabbi David G. Dalin in the book The Myth of Hitler's Pope.

Awards

He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1993), which describes the background and effect of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863. He was awarded the National Medal for the Humanities in 1998. He has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award, including as a co-winner for nonfiction in 1978 for Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, a book that also won the Merle Curti Award.

Wills has been awarded the honorary degree of L.H.D. by the College of the Holy Cross (1982) and by Bates College (1995).

Public appraisal

The New York Times literary critic John Leonard said in 1970 that Wills "reads like a combination of H. L. Mencken, John Locke and Albert Camus." The Roman Catholic journalist, John L. Allen, Jr. considers Wills to be "perhaps the most distinguished Catholic intellectual in America over the last 50 years" (as of 2008). Martin Gardner in "The Strange Case of Garry Wills" states there is a "mystery and strangeness that hovers like a gray fog over everything Wills has written about his faith".

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
• Saint Augustine's Childhood (2001), ISBN 0670030015
• Saint Augustine's Memory (2002), ISBN 0670031275
• Saint Augustine's Sin (2003), ISBN 0670032417
• Saint Augustine's Conversion (2004), ISBN 0670033529
• 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
• Bomb Power (2010), ISBN 978-1-59420-240-7
• Outside Looking In : Adventures of an Observer (2010), ISBN 978-0670022144

Further reading

• Perlstein, Rick, "The American Atom", Bookforum: Rick Perlstein talks to Garry Wills about "The Bomb".
• Delbanco, Andrew, "The Right-Wing Christians", New York Review of Books, Review of Wills's Head and Heart: American Christianities.
• New York Times, "Featured Author" page.
• New York Times, Index of articles about Garry Wills, (covers 1983 to 2008).
• Northwestern University, History Faculty of NW university
• Wills at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, a live conversation with Dean Alan Jones (archived)
• Wills, Garry, 13 October 2007, Lecture at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. to promote his book, Head and Heart.
• Works by or about Garry Wills in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

External links

• Booknotes interview with Wills on Under God: Religion and American Politics, December 30, 1990.
• In Depth interview with Wills, January 2, 2005