Recommended Non Fiction Writers

Jennet Conant (born July 15, 1959) is an American non-fiction author and journalist. She has written five books about World War II, three of which have appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list: Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science that Changes the Course of WWII, 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, and A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in Asia and America, she received a BA degree (cum laude) in Political Theory from Bryn Mawr College in 1982, and double-majored in Philosophy at Haverford College. She completed a master's degree in Journalism from New York City's Columbia University in 1983. She was awarded a John J. McCloy Fellowship to study politics in Germany.

Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor is an American author, singer, humorist, voice actor, and radio personality. He created the Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) show A Prairie Home Companion, which he hosted from 1974 to 2016. Keillor created the fictional Minnesota town Lake Wobegon, the setting of many of his books, including Lake Wobegon Days and Leaving Home: A Collection of Lake Wobegon Stories. Other creations include Guy Noir, a detective voiced by Keillor who appeared in A Prairie Home Companion comic skits. Keillor is also the creator of the five-minute daily radio/podcast program The Writer's Almanac, which pairs one or two poems of his choice with a script about important literary, historical, and scientific events that coincided with that date in history.

Lawrence Wright (born August 2, 1947) is an American writer and journalist, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Wright is best known as the author of the 2006 nonfiction book Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright is also known for his work with documentarian Alex Gibney who directed film versions of Wright's one man show My Trip to Al-Qaeda and his book Going Clear. His 2020 novel, The End of October, a thriller about a pandemic, was released in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, to generally positive reviews.

Wright graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, Texas, in 1965 and was inducted into the school's Hall of Fame in 2009. He is a graduate of Tulane University and taught English at the American University in Cairo (from which he was awarded a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics in 1969) in Egypt for two years. Wright lives in Austin, Texas.

Mark Helprin is an American novelist, journalist, conservative commentator, Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. While Helprin's fictional works straddle a number of disparate genres and styles, he has stated that he "belongs to no literary school, movement, tendency, or trend".

Michael D'Antonio is an American author, journalist, and commentator on CNN. He shared the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting with a team of Newsday reporters for their coverage of the Baby Jane Doe Case. He has written over a dozen books, including Never Enough, a 2015 biography of Donald Trump, and A Consequential President, a 2017 book on the Presidency of Barack Obama. His book Mortal Sins was a 2014 Edgar Award nominee.

D'Antonio was born May 11, 1955, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 1977. He wrote for the Dover Democrat in New Hampshire from 1976 to 1977, and the Portland Press Herald in Maine from 1977 to 1983 before joining Newsday as a writer, where he worked from 1983 to 1990. He was also a contributing editor to Child magazine.

Martin Booth was an English novelist and poet. He also worked as a teacher and screenwriter, and was the founder of the Sceptre Press.

Oliver Wolf Sacks was a British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and writer. Born in Britain, Sacks received his medical degree in 1958 from The Queen's College, Oxford, before moving to the United States, where he spent most of his career. He interned at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and completed his residency in neurology and neuropathology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). After a fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he served as neurologist at Beth Abraham Hospital's chronic-care facility in the Bronx, where he worked with a group of survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness encephalitis lethargica, who had been unable to move on their own for decades. His treatment of those patients became the basis of his 1973 book Awakenings, which was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated feature film in 1990, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro.

Joshua Davis is an American writer, film producer and co-founder of Epic Magazine.

William Timothy O'Brien (born October 1, 1946) is an American novelist. He is best known for his book The Things They Carried (1990), a collection of linked semi-autobiographical stories inspired by O'Brien's experiences in the Vietnam War. In 2010, The New York Times described O'Brien's book as a Vietnam classic. In addition, he is known for his war novel, Going After Cacciato (1978), also about wartime Vietnam, and later novels about postwar lives of veterans.

O'Brien held the endowed chair at the MFA program of Texas State University–San Marcos every other academic year from 2003–2004 to 2011-2012 (2003–2004, 2005–2006, 2007–2008, 2009–2010, and 2011–2012).

Tim O'Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota. When he was ten, his family, including a younger sister and brother, moved to Worthington, Minnesota. Worthington had a large influence on O’Brien's imagination and his early development as an author. The town is on Lake Okabena in the southwestern part of the state and serves as the setting for some of his stories, especially those in The Things They Carried.

Susan Horowitz Cain (born 1968) is an American writer and lecturer.

She is the author of the 2012 non-fiction book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, which argues that modern Western culture misunderstands and undervalues the traits and capabilities of introverted people. In 2015, she co-founded Quiet Revolution, a mission-based company with initiatives in the areas of children (parenting and education), lifestyle, and the workplace. Her 2016 follow-on book, Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts, focused on introverted children and teens, the book also being directed to their educators and parents.

Her book Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole (2022) focused on accepting feelings of sorrow and longing as inspiration to experience sublime emotions—such as beauty and wonder and transcendence—to counterbalance the "normative sunshine" of society's pressure to constantly be positive.