George Packer
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Staff Writer, The New Yorker

Axel Springer Fellow and Holtzbrinck Fellow - Class of Fall 2009 and Class of Spring 2014

George Packer is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author, most recently, of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), which received the 2013 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Packer has also written two novels, The Half Man (Random House, 1991) and Central Square (Graywolf, 1998), and four other works of nonfiction, all published by FSG: The Village of Waiting (2001); Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award; The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, which received several prizes and was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by the New York Times Book Review; and Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade (2009). Packer is also the editor of The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World (Harper, 2003) and a two-volume edition of George Orwell’s essays. His play, Betrayed, based on a New Yorker article, won the 2008 Lucille Lortel award for Best Off-Broadway Play.

 

After graduating from Yale University, in 1982, Packer served in the Peace Corps in Togo, West Africa. As a journalist he has reported on atrocities in Sierra Leone, civil unrest in the Ivory Coast, the megacity of Lagos, and global counter-insurgency. A 2009 Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Packer is the recipient of two Overseas Press Club Awards (2003) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2001-2002).

Project Description

Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

Packer’s American Academy project is a biography of the late diplomat Richard C. Holbrooke. The book, Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, will trace Holbrooke’s career from Vietnam in the early 1960s, through the Balkans in the mid-1990s, to Afghanistan and Pakistan, his last diplomatic mission. Holbrooke’s life and work encompassed many of the crises, triumphs, and tragedies of American foreign policy over the past two generations, as well as the golden age and subsequent eclipse of the Cold War foreign policy establishment in Washington and New York. In Packer’s biography, the narrative of Holbrooke’s diplomatic career becomes a compelling account of American power in the last decades of the American Century.

Academy Activities

08 May 14

The Unwinding

New Yorker staff writer and spring 2014 fellow George Packer reads from his National Book Award-winning account of American change over the last fifty years, The Unwinding. The book interweaves the stories of everyday, working Americans, social history, economic statistics, and biographical sketches ...

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