Author Bio
• Birth—January 4, 1943
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Colby College; Ph.D., Harvard University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1995 for No Ordinary Time
• Currently—lives in Concord, Massachusetts
Doris Kearns Goodwin is an award-winning American author, historian, and political commentator. She won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995. She is the author of biographies of U.S. Presidents, including Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln; Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream; The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga; and her Pulitzer Prize winning book No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Homefront During World War II.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Goodwin actually grew up in Rockville Centre on Long Island. She attended Colby College in Maine where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa; graduating magna cum laude in 1964 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. She was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1964 to pursue her doctoral studies. She earned her Ph.D. in government from Harvard University.
In 1967, Goodwin went to Washington, D.C., as a White House Fellow during the Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) administration, working as his assistant. After Johnson left office, she assisted Johnson in drafting his memoirs. After LBJ's retirement in 1969, Goodwin taught government at Harvard for ten years, including a course on the American Presidency. In 1977, her first book, Lyndon Johnson & the American Dream, was published in which she drew on her conversations with the late president. The book became a New York Times bestseller and provided a launching pad for her literary career.
Goodwin won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Homefront During World War II. In 1998 she received an honorary L.H.D. from Bates College. In 2005, she won the 2005 Lincoln Prize (for best book about the American Civil War) for Team of Rivals.
In 1975, Kearns married Richard N. Goodwin, who had worked in the Johnson and Kennedy administration as an adviser and a speechwriter. They have three sons, Richard, Michael and Joseph. One of her sons is heading to Iraq for a second tour of duty. As of 2007, the Goodwins live in Concord, Massachusetts.
Goodwin was the first female journalist to enter the Boston Red Sox locker room. She consulted on and appeared in Ken Burns' 1994 award-winning documentary Baseball and is a life-long supporter of both the Dodgers and the Boston Red Sox. (From Wikipedia.)