Nicholas Lemann

Nicholas Lemann autographing a book at the 2006 Texas Book Festival.

Nicholas Berthelot Lemann is dean and Henry R. Luce professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City.

Lemann is from New Orleans and he graduated from Harvard University in 1976, but has never attended a school of journalism. He is a journalist, editor, and author of several books on 20th century United States history. He has also been:

• Managing editor of the Washington Monthly
• associate editor and executive editor of the Texas Monthly
• a national staff reporter for The Washington Post
• a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly
• a staff writer for The New Yorker
• President of The Harvard Crimson

Lemann is a member of the Council on the Future of Media. This council is "championing a new global, independent news and information service whose role is to inform, educate and improve the state of the world- one that would take advantage of all platforms of content delivery from mobile to satellite and online to create a new global network."

Personal

Lemann has been married twice. His first wife was Dominique Alice Browning, who later became an editor in chief of House & Garden; they married on 20 May 1983, have two sons, Alexander and Theodore, and later divorced. His second wife is Judith Anne Shulevitz, who was a columnist for Slate and The New York Times Book Review; married on November 7, 1999, they have a son and a daughter. His sister is Nancy Lemann, a novelist. He is a practicing Jew.

Selected publications

• New Yorker articles:
  • September 2005 commentary on Hurricane Katrina
  • August 2006 article on Citizen journalism, titled, Amateur Hour: Journalism Without Journalists
  • August 2007 commentary titled Rovian Ways on Karl Rove's resignation and legacy
• The Big Test (1999) ISBN 978-0374527518 (The story of how standardized tests (such as the SAT) became very important in the United States)
  • "None of the Above" Review, by Andrew Sullivan, The New York Times, Oct. 24, 1999.
  • "BOOKS OF THE TIMES; What's Wrong With the SAT and Its Elite Progeny" Review by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times, Oct. 4, 1999
• The Promised Land : The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991) ISBN 978-0394269672 (On the migration of millions of black people from the South to the North in the 1940s and 1950s)
• Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (2006) ISBN 978-0374248550 (The story of Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War)
  • "A Less Perfect Union Review by Sean Willentz, in the New York Times Sept. 10, 2006
  • First chapter of book, on the NY Times site.
• Slate articles:
  • June 1996 [1] on Asian Americans as "the new Jews."
  • October 2004 [2] on Philip Roth's The Plot Against America

External links

• Audio Interview with Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review. (MP3 format)
• Lemann and Steve Shepard discuss future of journalism.
• Booknotes interview with Lemann on The Promised Land, May 5, 1991.