Nicholas Lemann

Nicholas Lemann has been the Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor at the Columbia School of Journalism since 2003. Lemann began his journalism career as a 17-year-old writer for an alternative weekly newspaper there, the Vieux Carre Courier. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1976, where he concentrated in American history and literature and was president of the Harvard Crimson.

After graduation, he worked at the Washington Monthly, as an associate editor and then managing editor; at Texas Monthly, as an associate editor and then executive editor; at The Washington Post, as a member of the national staff; at The Atlantic Monthly, as national correspondent; and at The New Yorker, as staff writer and then Washington correspondent.

Lemann continues to contribute to The New Yorker as a staff writer. He has published five books, most recently Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (2006); The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999), which helped lead to a major reform of the SAT; and The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America(1991), which won several book prizes. He has written widely for such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and Slate; worked in documentary television with Blackside, Inc., "FRONTLINE," the Discovery Channel, and the BBC; and lectured at many universities.

Articles by this Author

Esther Bubley’s America, May 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 3

In a career spent photographing the country during a time of triumph and prosperity, she also left a record of the loneliness, melancholy, and individual courage that are always part of the human lot

Education Initiative, May/June 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 3

Civil Rights Initiative, May/June 1998 | Vol. 49, No. 3

The End of Racism? - A Talk with Mr. D'Souza, February/March 1996 | Vol. 47, No. 1

How the Seventies Changed America, July/August 1991 | Vol. 42, No. 4

The “loser decade” that at first seemed nothing more than a breathing space between the high drama of the 1960s and whatever was coming next is beginning to reveal itself as a richer time than we thought.

A Heart’s Love for New Orleans, April 1988 | Vol. 39, No. 3

The modern city plays host to conventions and tourists, but it still retains the slightly racy charm that has always made it dear to its natives.

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