John A. Farrell is the bestselling author of Richard Nixon: The Life, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography and which won the PEN America Award for the best biography and the New-York Historical Society book prize for the best volume of American history of 2017. His latest book, Ted Kennedy: A Life, made the first list of finalists for the National Book Award. Farrell has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia and started his literary career as a prize-winning newspaperman, most notably for the Boston Globe, where he served as White House correspondent and on the vaunted Spotlight team. In 2001, he published Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, a biography of the late Speaker of the House, which won the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the best book on Congress. Farrell’s biography of the great American defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned, won the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for best biography of the year. He has also earned a George Polk award for investigative reporting and the Gerald R. Ford prize and White House Correspondents’ Association honors for coverage of the presidency.