James Marcus

James Marcus was born in the literary hotbed of Paterson, NJ, and grew up in the New York area. He is the author of "Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson" and "Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut," as well as seven translations from the Italian, the most recent being Giacomo Casanova's "The Duel." His work has appeared many publications, including the the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Salon, the Nation, Raritan, the Paris Review, and the Village Voice, and his essay "Faint Music" was selected for "Best American Essays 2009."

After serving as editor-in-chief of Harper's Magazine, he now teaches at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is currently working on a three-generational family chronicle, for which he received a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship.