Thomas Edsall
Thomas Byrne Edsall holds the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Chair at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Edsall covered national politics for 25 years at the Washington Post.
In 2006, in addition to teaching at Columbia, he was a guest columnist for the New York Times. He is currently also political editor at the Huffington Post and a correspondent for The New Republic.
Edsall has written frequently for such magazines as The Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The American Prospect, the Nation, the Washington Monthly, and Dissent.
His awards include the Carey McWilliams Award of the American Political Science Association honoring "a major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics," the Bill Pryor Award of the Newspaper Guild, a year-long fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and five Media Fellowships at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Edsall is the author of Building Red America: the New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power, which was released in August, 2006. A previous book, Chain Reaction: the Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 1992. In 1988 he was the co-editor of The Reagan Legacy and published a collection of his reporting, Power and Money: Writing About Politics. In 1984, he wrote The New Politics on Inequality.
He has contributed chapters to a number of books, including The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order 1930-1980 (1989), Red and Blue Nation-Characteristics and Causes of America's Polarized Politics (2006), and Varieties of Progressivism in America (2004). Before joining the Washington Post in 1981, Edsall worked for 14 years at the Baltimore Sun, covering a wide range of local and national beats. In 1965-1966, he served in the VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program, working in East Baltimore. In 1965, Edsall covered suburban county governments in Rhode Island for the Providence Journal. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Edsall attended Brown University and received a B.A. degree in political science from Boston University. He is married to Mary Deutsch Edsall and they have one daughter, Alexandra Victor Edsall, and two grandchildren, Thomas Edsall Victor and Lydia Victor.
