Thomas Edsall

Thomas Byrne Edsall (born 1941) is an American journalist and academic, best known for his 25 years at the Washington Post. He holds the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professorship in Public Affairs Journalism at Columbia University, and is a correspondent for The New Republic and The National Journal. He is political editor of the Huffington Post.[1]

Edsall was born in 1941 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, attended Brown University and received his B.A. from Boston University in 1966. He is married and lives with his wife, Mary, in New York and Washington, D.C.

In November and December 2006, Edsall was a guest columnist for the New York Times Op-Ed page. Edsall joined the full-time faculty at Columbia in October, 2006 after a twenty-five year career at The Washington Post. During that time, he covered national politics, including presidential elections, the House and Senate, lobbying, tax policy, demographic trends, social welfare, the politics of race and ethnicity, and organized labor. Prior to his work at the Washington Post, Edsall reported for The Baltimore Sun and The Providence Journal. He has contributed television and radio commentary to CNN, CSPAN, MSNBC, PBS, FOX, and NPR.

Edsall has written for The American Prospect, The Atlantic Monthly, Civilization, Dissent, Harper's, The Nation, The National Journal, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The Washington Monthly. Awards include the Carey McWilliams Award of the American Political Science Association, the Bill Pryor Award of the Newspaper Guild, a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and five Media Fellowships at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Bibliography

As author

• The New Politics of Inequality (W.W. Norton, 1984).
• Power and Money: Writing About Politics (W.W. Norton, 1988)
• Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (W.W. Norton, 1992)

A 1992 Pulitzer finalist in the category of General Non-Fiction.

• Building Red America (Basic Books, 2006)

Edsall is also the editor of or contributor to: Red and Blue Nation? Characteristics and Causes of America's Polarized Politics, contributor (Brookings, 2006); Varieties of Progressivism in America, contributor (Hoover, 2004); Deadlock: The Inside Story of America’s Closest Election contributor (2001); Present Discontents, contributor (1997); The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order 1930-1980, contributor, (Princeton, 1989); and The Reagan Legacy, co-editor and contributor,(Pantheon, 1988).

References

• Columbia University faculty bio for Edsall
• Marquis Who's Who in America, 2006

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