
About the author
Robert Wilson is the author of Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation, a narrative biography of the 19th-century American photographer, which was published by Bloomsbury USA in August of 2013.
Wilson’s biography The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax–Clarence King in the Old West, was published in 2006 by Scribner and in paperback in 2007 by Counterpoint. He is also the editor of A Certain Somewhere: Writers on the Places They Remember, published by Random House in 2002.
His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Discover, The New Republic, The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, and The Wilson Quarterly. Articles based on the book have recently appeared in Civil War Times, Military History Quarterly, and American History.
He has been the editor of The American Scholar since 2004. Before that he was editor of Preservation, literary editor of Civilization, a columnist at USA Today, and an assistant editor at The Washington Post. He has taught in the graduate writing programs of Johns Hopkins, American, and George Mason universities, and taught undergraduates at the University of Virginia, where he earned an M.A. He has a B.A. from Washington and Lee University.
He lives in Manassas, Virginia.
He is at work on a biography of P. T. Barnum, which will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2018.
Watch an interview with Robert Wilson on the PBS NewsHour.
Watch a YouTube of Robert Wilson speaking at Politics & Prose.
Robert Wilson is the author of Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation, a narrative biography of the 19th-century American photographer, which was published by Bloomsbury USA in August of 2013.
Wilson’s biography The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax–Clarence King in the Old West, was published in 2006 by Scribner and in paperback in 2007 by Counterpoint. He is also the editor of A Certain Somewhere: Writers on the Places They Remember, published by Random House in 2002.
His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Discover, The New Republic, The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, and The Wilson Quarterly. Articles based on the book have recently appeared in Civil War Times, Military History Quarterly, and American History.
He has been the editor of The American Scholar since 2004. Before that he was editor of Preservation, literary editor of Civilization, a columnist at USA Today, and an assistant editor at The Washington Post. He has taught in the graduate writing programs of Johns Hopkins, American, and George Mason universities, and taught undergraduates at the University of Virginia, where he earned an M.A. He has a B.A. from Washington and Lee University.
He lives in Manassas, Virginia.
He is at work on a biography of P. T. Barnum, which will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2018.
Watch an interview with Robert Wilson on the PBS NewsHour.
Watch a YouTube of Robert Wilson speaking at Politics & Prose.