Jill Lepore

Biography

Jill Lepore (born 1966) is an American historian and journalist. She is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. Her work focuses on American history, law, literature, and politics.

Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Journal of American History, Foreign Affairs, the Yale Law Journal, The American Scholar, and American Quarterly. Four of her books derive from New Yorker essays, including The Whites of Their Eyes (2010); The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death (2012), a finalist for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction; The Story of America: Essays on Origins (2012), shortlisted for the PEN Literary Award for the Art of the Essay; and This America: The Case for the Nation (2019). In 2026 her We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History.

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