Ron Rosenbaum

Spring 2007
Course: Never Too Soon To Start: Getting Your First Book Underway

Ron Rosenbaum is the author of seven books. He grew up on Long Island, New York. A graduate of Yale with a degree in English literature, he left Yale Graduate School to write full-time. His essays and journalism have appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, and The New York Observer among others. He has written eight cover stories for The New York Times Magazine. Many of these essays have been collected in four volumes, most recently The Secret Parts of Fortune (Random House 2000) with a forward by filmmaker Errol Morris who calls Rosenbaum "one of the great masters of the metaphysical detective story, a non-fiction writer in the spirit of Borges, Nabokov, and Poe."

His recent books have included Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origin of His Evil (Random House, 1998), which was called "An exciting journey by one of the most original journalists and writers of our time," by David Remnick and "a provocative work of cultural history" by The New York Times. It was a national bestseller and has been translated into 10 languages. He has also edited an anthology on the question of anti-Semitism -- Those Who Forget the Past (Random House, 2004).

His most recent book, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups (Random House, 2006) has been called "Electrifying. A spectacular book," by Cynthia Ozick, and praised by The New York Times Book Review for "conveying the 'unbearably pleasurable' state brought on by Shakespeare's work."

He has taught narrative journalism at Columbia and NYU, has been a Distinguished Visitor at Medill, and was co-writer on the award winning PBS/Frontline documentary “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero."

Ron Rosenbaum is the 2007 Vare Nonfiction Writer-in-Residence at The University of Chicago.