David Lehman

A steady contributor to American Heritage, David Lehman has written both poetry and nonfiction books. He edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry and helped found The Best American Poetry, an annual collection of American poems, in 1988. In 1990, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Lehman an Academy Award in literature, and his latest works include Yeshiva Boys, a book of poems, and A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, both released in 2009.

Mr. Lehman currently serves as the Associate Professor of Writing at the New School of New York.

Articles by this Author

Alfred Hitchcock’s America, April/May 2007 | Vol. 58, No. 2

Frankophilia, November/December 2002 | Vol. 53, No. 6

WHY SINATRA IS OUR GREATEST SINGER, PERIOD

Detective Novelist, October 2002 | Vol. 53, No. 5

Poet, May/June 1998 | Vol. 49, No. 3

Fairfield Porter, A Heretic in the Abstract Expressionist Era, September 1997 | Vol. 48, No. 5

At the height of the American avant-garde movement, Fairfield Porter’s realistic paintings defied the orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism and risked rejection by the art world. But today, his true stature is becoming apparent: He may just be the best we have.

The Artistic Triumph of New York, September 1995 | Vol. 46, No. 5

World War I made the city the financial capital of the world. Then, after World War II, a very few audacious painters and passionate critics made it the cultural capital, as well. Here is how they seized the torch from Europe.

Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

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Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.