Frances FitzGerald (journalist)

Frances FitzGerald was born in New York City, the only daughter of Desmond FitzGerald, an attorney on Wall Street, and socialite Marietta Peabody.[1] Her grandmother was a prominent activist in the civil rights movement of the 1960s,[2] and from an early age, FitzGerald was introduced to a wide range of political figures.[3] Her parents divorced shortly after World War II. From 1950 to his death in 1967, her father was an intelligence officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, becoming a deputy director.

As a teenager, FitzGerald wrote voluminous letters to Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, her mother's lover,[4] expressing her opinion on many subjects, a reflection of her deep interest in world affairs.[5] She graduated from Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia and magna cum laude from Radcliffe College, then a women's college associated with Harvard University.

External video
Booknotes interview with FitzGerald and Peter Kann on Reporting Vietnam, January 31, 1999, C-SPAN

FitzGerald became a journalist, initially writing for the New York Herald Tribune magazine. She went to Vietnam in 1966.[6] Her "Annals of War" series on the Vietnam War in The New Yorker (1972) earned her a Special Front Page Award.[7] Her debut book, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972), was met with great acclaim when it was published, and is still considered one of the most notable books about the Vietnam War. For Fire in the Lake, she won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the Bancroft Prize for history, and the U.S. National Book Award in Contemporary Affairs.[8][9] The book cautioned that the United States did not understand the history and culture of Vietnam and it warned about American involvement there.[10]

FitzGerald has continued to write about history and culture: her published books include America Revised (1979), a highly critical review of history textbooks published in the United States; Cities on a Hill (1987), an analysis of United States urban history compared to ideals; Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (2000),[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] a Pulitzer Prize finalist;[19] and Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth (2002).[20]

Her book Cities on a Hill includes a chapter on the Rajneesh Ranch, whose rise and fall in the 1980s in Oregon is the subject of the documentary "Wild, Wild Country".

External media
Audio
NPR interview with FitzGerald on The Evangelicals, May 2, 2017
Video
Presentation by FitzGerald on The Evangelicals, April 12, 2017, C-SPAN

Her book, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, published in 2017,[21] is a history of the evangelical movement, its central figures, and its long-reaching influence upon American history, politics, and culture.[22][23][24] The Evangelicals was shortlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for nonfiction.[25]

FitzGerald has also written numerous articles, which have been published in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Architectural Digest, and Rolling Stone. Her "Rewriting American history" was published in The Norton Reader. She serves on the editorial boards of The Nation and Foreign Policy magazines. She serves as vice-president of International PEN.

FitzGerald is married to James P. Sterba, a former writer for The Wall Street Journal. They live in New York City and Maine. Sterba featured the latter in his 2003 book Frankie's Place: A Love Story.[26]

• FitzGerald, F. (1972), Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
• FitzGerald, F. (1979), America Revised
• FitzGerald, F. (1986), Cities on a Hill: A Journey through Contemporary American Cultures
• FitzGerald, F. (2000), Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star wars and the End of the Cold War
• FitzGerald, F. (2001), Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth
• FitzGerald, F. (2017), The Evangelics: The Struggle to Shape America

• Index of Frances FitzGerald's articles at the New York Review of Books
• Appearances on C-SPAN