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Jill Lepore

Biography

Jill Lepore

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include the New York Times bestseller THE SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN, a national bestseller, and BOOK OF AGES, a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Jill Lepore

Books by Jill Lepore

If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
by Jill Lepore - History, Nonfiction
The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge --- decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine that it has no past, but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to predict and direct human behavior, deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon for clients that included John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, the New York Times, Young & Rubicam, and, during the Vietnam War, the Department of Defense.
These Truths: A History of the United States
by Jill Lepore - History, Nonfiction

The American experiment rests on three ideas --- "these truths," Jefferson called them --- political equality, natural rights and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, on a fearless dedication to inquiry, Jill Lepore argues, because self-government depends on it. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? THESE TRUTHS tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore traces the intertwined histories of American politics, law, journalism and technology.

Joe Gould's Teeth
by Jill Lepore - Biography, History, Nonfiction

Digging through archives all over the country, New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore unearthed evidence that “The Oral History of Our Time” did in fact once exist. Relying on letters, scraps, and Gould’s own diaries and notebooks --- including volumes of his lost manuscript --- Lepore argues that Joe Gould’s real secret had to do with sex and the color line, with modernists’ relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, and, above all, with Gould’s terrifying obsession with the African American sculptor Augusta Savage. In ways that even Gould himself could not have imagined, what Gould wrote down really is a history of our time: unsettling and ferocious.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman
by Jill Lepore - Cultural Studies, History, Nonfiction

Aside from Superman and Batman, no superhero has lasted as long or commanded so vast and wildly passionate a following as Wonder Woman. Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she also has a secret history. Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator.

Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin
by Jill Lepore - Autobiography, Biography, History

Making use of an astonishing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one extraordinary woman but an entire world.