About the Author
Daniel J. Boorstin, one of the United States' most important historians, was born in 1914 in Atlanta, Georgia. Raised in Oklahoma, Boorstin graduated with honors from Harvard, studied at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and earned his PhD. at Yale. Boorstin taught for many years at the University of Chicago, and he has held many teaching positions abroad with stints at the University of Rome, the University of Geneva, Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne. He was also the twelfth Librarian of Congress, a post which he held from 1975 to 1987.

Boorstin's books have been translated into over twenty languages, and have won numerous awards. The Americans: The Colonial Experience, the first in a trilogy of books, won the Bancroft Prize. The follow-up, The Americans: The Democratic Experience, won the Pulitzer Prize and the third, The Americans: The National Experience, won the Francis Parkman Prize. Boorstin is one of only a few people to have won all three awards. His other works include The Creators, The Discoverers, and Cleopatra's Nose: Essays on the Unexpected. Boorstin has won Phi Beta Kappa's Distinguished Service to the Humanities Award and the National Book Award for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters.