Garry Wills

Garry Wills is Professor Emeritus of History at Northwestern University. He previously served as the Henry R. Luce Professor of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern and as professor of classics at Johns Hopkins University. One of America's most distinguished historians and public intellectuals, he is the author of 40 books. He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1993). He was awarded the National Medal for the Humanities in 1998. He has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award, including as a co-winner for nonfiction in 1978 for Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, a book that also won the Merle Curti Award. Wills has served as the first Washington Irving Professor of Modern American History at Union College; Fellow of the Institute of Humanities at the University of Edinburgh; Regents Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Silliman Seminarist at Yale University; and Christian Gauss Lecturer at Princeton University, among other academic appointments.He has received the Wilbur Cross Medal of the Yale Graduate School, John Hope Franklin Award of the Chicago Historical Society, and Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting, for writing and narrating "The Choice" for Frontline. Wills has been awarded honorary degrees by many schools, including the College of the Holy Cross (1982), Bates College (1995), Muhlenberg College (2004), the University of Connecticut (2008), Knox College (2009), and Bard College (2009). His most recent books include Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer (2010), Verdi's Shakespeare: Men of the Theater (2011), Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (2011), and Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism (2012).