THOMAS MALLON, born on this date,  is an American novelist, essayist, and critic. His novels are renowned for their attention to historical detail and context and for the author’s crisp wit and interest in the “bystanders” to larger historical events. He is the author of ten books of fiction, including Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, Bandbox, Fellow Travelers (adapted into a miniseries by the same name), Watergate, Finale, Landfall, and most recently Up With the Sun. He has also published nonfiction on plagiarism (Stolen Words), diaries (A Book of One’s Own), letters (Yours Ever) and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine’s Garage), as well as two volumes of essays (Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact).

Mallon studied English at Brown University, where he wrote his undergraduate honors thesis on American author Mary McCarthy. He credits McCarthy, with whom he later became friends, as the most enduring influence on his career as a writer.

Mallon earned a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he wrote his dissertation on the English World War I poet Edmund Blunden. On sabbatical from Vassar College in 1982–1983, Mallon spent a year as a visiting scholar at St. Edmund’s House (later College) at Cambridge University, where he drafted most of A Book of One’s Own, a work of nonfiction about diarists and diary-writing. The book’s rather unexpected success earned Mallon tenure at Vassar College, where he taught English from 1979 to 1991.

Mallon is the author of twelve novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, Landfall, and Up With the Sun. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. In  2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

He is a former literary editor of Gentleman’s Quarterly, where he wrote the “Doubting Thomas” column in the 1990s, and has contributed frequently to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, and other periodicals. He was appointed a member of the National Council on the Humanities in 2002 and served as Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2005 to 2006.

His honors include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the National Book Critics Circle citation for reviewing, and the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for distinguished prose style. He was elected as a new member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.

Out gay, Mallon currently lives with his longtime partner, William Bodenschatz, in Washington, DC, and is a professor emeritus of English at The George Washington University. He once described himself as a “supposed literary/intellectual/homosexual /Republican.” During the 2016 election he was actively involved in Scholars and Writers Against Trump, a group of disaffected conservatives. He left the Republican Party in November 2016.