Thomas Mallon

Thomas Mallon’s eleven books of fiction include Henry and Clara, Fellow Travelers, Watergate (a Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award) and Up With the Sun.  He has also written volumes of nonfiction about plagiarism (Stolen Words), diaries (A Book of One’s Own), letters (Yours Ever) and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine’s Garage), as well as two books of essays (Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact).  A collection of his personal journals, The Very Heart of It:  New York Diaries, 1983-1994, was published by Knopf in 2025.

Mallon’s work appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and other publications.  He received his Ph. D. in English and American Literature from Harvard University and taught for a number of years at Vassar College.  His honors include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the National Book Critics Circle citation for reviewing, and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for distinguished prose style.  He has been literary editor of Gentlemen’s Quarterly and deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  An eight-part dramatic adaptation of his novel Fellow Travelers is now streaming on Showtime/Paramount+, and an opera based on the novel has had a dozen productions throughout the United States.  He is Professor Emeritus of English at The George Washington University and lives in Washington, D. C. 

Books

Fiction

The Late Unpleasantness (Knopf, forthcoming in 2027)

Up With the Sun (Knopf, 2023)

Landfall (Pantheon, 2019)
Finale (Pantheon, 2015)
Watergate (Pantheon, 2012)
Fellow Travelers (Pantheon, 2007)
Bandbox (Pantheon, 2004)
Two Moons (Pantheon, 2000). 

Dewey Defeats Truman (Pantheon, 1997)
Henry and Clara (Houghton Mifflin; Ticknor & Fields, 1994)
Aurora 7 (Houghton Mifflin; Ticknor & Fields, 1991)
Arts and Sciences (Houghton Mifflin; Ticknor & Fields, 1988)

Nonfiction

The Very Heart of It:  New York Diaries, 1983-1994 (Knopf, 2025)
Yours Ever: People and Their Letters (Pantheon, 2009)
Mrs. Paine’s Garage (Pantheon, 2002)
In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing (Pantheon, 2001)
Rockets and Rodeos (Houghton Mifflin; Ticknor & Fields, 1993)
Stolen Words: Forays Into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (Houghton Mifflin; Ticknor &  Fields,1989)
A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries (Houghton Mifflin; Ticknor & Fields,1984)
Edmund Blunden (G. K. Hall, 1983)

Recent articles and essays

“A Woman Scorned,” The New Yorker, May 25, 2026, pp. 59-62.  (Review of Lois Romano’s biography of Mary Todd Lincoln, An Inconvenient Woman.)

“By the Book,” The New Yorker, July 7 & 14, 2025, pp. 60-64.  An essay about the works of fiction recommended in the first issue of the magazine, one hundred years before, in 1925.

“Party Favors:  Perle Mesta and the Golden Age of the Washington Hostress,” The New Yorker, January 27, 2025, pp. 70-73.

Website:  www.thomasmallon.com

Ph.D., Harvard University, 1978
M.A., Harvard University, 1974
B.A., Brown University, 1973