Thomas Powers

Thomas Powers is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author whose most recent book, The Killing of Crazy Horse, published by Alfred Knopf in November 2010, won the  Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history and the Western Writers of America Spur Award for best historical non-fiction. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in biography. He is currently writing a memoir of his father.

Previous books include Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (Knopf, 1993); The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (Knopf, 1979), and a novel The Confirmation (Knopf, 2000). Heisenberg’s War was published simultaneously in four countries – the United States, Germany, France and Britain, where it was widely reviewed and sparked a continuing controversy. More recently, Heisenberg’s War inspired British playwright Michael Frayn to write Copenhagen about the 1941 visit of Werner Heisenberg to Niels Bohr, which opened in London in 1998 and on Broadway in 2000, where it won a Tony Award as the year’s best play. Powers has also published three books of essays -- Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al Qaeda (2004) a collection of essays written over the previous 25 years which originally appeared in the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books; The Military Error: Baghdad and Beyond in America’s War of Choice (2008), and Thinking About the Next War (1982).

Powers won a Pulitzer Prize in National reporting in 1971 for a series of articles later turned into his first book Diana: the Making of a Terrorist (Houghton Mifflin, 1971). This was followed by The War at Home: Vietnam and the American People (Viking, 1973). At various times, Powers has been a contributing editor of The Atlantic, The Los Angles Times Opinion Section, and Rolling Stone, and has also published articles and reviews in numerous periodicals, including the London Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and The Nation.

Powers has been a freelance writer since 1970. Previously he worked as a journalist for the New Haven Journal-Courier (1962), the Rome Daily American in Italy (1965-67) , and for United Press International in New York City (1967-70). He is graduate of Yale University (1964) and for thirty years was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Since 1982 he has lived in Vermont where he is one of the four founding partners and editors of Steerforth Press, a literary trade publishing house, now based in  Hanover, New Hampshire.