Life and career

Jon Ellis Meacham was born on May 20, 1969 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the son of Jere Ellis Meacham and Linda McBrayer Meacham, an executive. He attended St. Nicholas School, the McCallie School and the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he was an initiate of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. He graduated summa cum laude in 1991 with a degree in English Literature, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Meacham was an only child and spent his high school years living with his grandfather, Judge Ellis K. Meacham. The author of three Napoleonic-era maritime novels about the Bombay Marine of the East India Company, Judge Meacham gave Meacham his interest in history, literature, and politics.

Meacham joined Newsweek as a writer in January 1995, became national affairs editor in June of that year, and was named managing editor in November 1998. In September 2006, he was promoted to editor-in-chief. In August 2010 Meacham announced that he would depart Newsweek upon completion of the sale of the magazine by the Washington Post Company. He has also written essays and reviews for The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times Book Review.

From May 2010 to April 2011, Meacham was co-host with Alison Stewart of Need to Know on PBS.

Meacham has edited books by Al Gore, Clara Bingham, Charles Peters, Mary Soames, Mika Brzezinski, Joe Scarborough, and others. He supervises the publication of the letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr..

His presidential biography of Andrew Jackson won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. His 2015 biography of George H. W. Bush received mixed reviews: some praised its "historical rehabilitation of its subject", while others criticized it for being insufficiently hard-nosed in its depiction of its subject.

Meacham is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a former trustee and member of the Board of Regents of University of the South, a Fellow of the Society of American Historians, a member of the Vestry of Trinity Wall Street, a trustee of the Churchill Centre, and a member of the Advisory Board of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. The Anti-Defamation League awarded Meacham the Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Prize. He received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University in 2005 and holds five other honorary doctorates.

Meacham and his wife, Margaret Keith Smythe Meacham, a native of Mississippi, former executive director of the Harlem Day Charter School, and a former programs officer with the Fund for Public Schools in New York, live in Nashville, Tennessee, with their three children. Meacham is a communicant of Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, where he has served on the Vestry of the 180-year-old Episcopal parish.

Books

• Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement (editor). New York: Random House. 2001. ISBN 978-0-375-75881-2.
• Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship. New York: Random House. 2003. ISBN 978-0-8129-7282-5.
• American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation. New York: Random House. 2006. ISBN 978-0-8129-7666-3.
• American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. New York: Random House. 2008. ISBN 978-1-4000-6325-3.
• American Homer: Reflections on Shelby Foote and His Classic The Civil War: A Narrative (editor). New York: Random House. 2011.
• Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. New York: Random House. 2012. ISBN 978-1-4000-6766-4.
• Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. New York: Random House. 2015. ISBN 978-1-4000-6765-7.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]