Rick Perlstein

Rick Perlstein
Rick Perlstein at a piano, selecting music to play from a book of jazz standards, Chicago, March 2013.
Born	September 3, 1969 (1969-09-03) (age 47)
Education	University of Chicago (B.A., 1992) University of Michigan
Occupation	Writer

Eric S. "Rick" Perlstein (born September 3, 1969) is an American historian and journalist, who has won wide acclaim for his chronicles of the 1960s and 1970s and the American conservative movement. Perlstein is the author of three bestselling books and is the winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.Politico has dubbed Perlstein "a chronicler extraordinaire of modern conservatism."

Perlstein was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to a Reform Jewish family, the third child of Jerold and Sandra (née Friedman) Perlstein. His father ran Bonded Messenger Service, a delivery company founded by his grandfather in 1955. Perlstein grew up in the Bayside and Fox Point neighborhoods of suburban Milwaukee, taking cross country trips with his parents and siblings to national landmarks like Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park. In high school, upon earning his driver's license Perlstein would head to Renaissance Books in downtown Milwaukee, spending hours in its basement among stacks of old magazines from the 1960s. Perlstein would later recount in an interview, "I ended up getting my own archive on the 1960s culture wars. That's where it started." He also wrote in Rolling Stone, "A sixties obsessive since childhood, I misspent my teenage years prowling a ramshackle five-story used-book warehouse that somehow managed . . . to stay one step ahead of Milwaukee, Wisconsin's building inspectors." Following graduation from Nicolet High School, Perlstein attended the University of Chicago, earning a B.A. in History in 1992. While at the University of Chicago, years Perlstein described as "delightfully noisy and dissident"—a stark contrast to the suburbia of his youth that he said "felt like a jail"—he was able to engage with and catch neighborhood jam sessions.