Eric Burns

Eric Burns is not only a skilled man of letters, but a versatile one. His first play, Mid-Strut, won the Eudora Welty Emerging Playwrights Competition in 2010. As a television news correspondent, he was named one of the best writers in the history of the medium, "an artist with words," as the leading college journalism textbook of its time called him. He won an Emmy for feature reporting and another for commentary. The author of fifteen books, he has twice earned the American Library Association's "Best of the Best" award, once for The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol (published in 2004), and again for The Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco (published in 2007). A later book, 1920: The Year That Made the Decade Roar, was named one of the best nonfiction volumes of 2015 by Kirkus Reviews. Burns has also produced two biographies. About one of them, The Golden Lad: The Haunting Story of Theodore and Quentin Roosevelt, Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, declared "this is how biographies should be written. Eric Burns lives in Connecticut, where he is at work on his first novel.