Tom Reiss
| Tom Reiss | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
May 5, 1964 New York City, New York, USA |
| Occupation | Writer, historian, journalist |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater |
Harvard College University of Houston |
| Genre | Historical biography |
| Notable works |
Führer-Ex The Orientalist The Black Count |
| Notable awards |
Pulitzer Prize 2013 |
| Children | 2 |
| Website | |
| www |
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Tom Reiss (born May 5, 1964) is an American author, historian, and journalist. He is the author of three nonfiction books, the latest of which is The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (2012), which received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. His previous books are Führer-Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Nazi (1996), the first inside exposé of the European neo-Nazi movement; and The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life (2005), which became an international bestseller. As a journalist, Reiss has written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.
Tom Reiss was born on May 5, 1964 in New York City, to Jewish parents. He spent his first years of his life in Washington Heights in Manhattan and then in San Antonio and Dallas, Texas, where his father worked as an Air Force neurosurgeon. After that, his family moved to Western Massachusetts, and he spent the rest of his childhood and adolescence in New England. He attended the Hotchkiss School and then Harvard College, where he joined the writing and editing staffs of The Harvard Crimson newspaper and The Harvard Advocate magazine. Graduating from Harvard in 1987, Reiss was also influenced by various jobs he held, such as hospital orderly, bartender, small business entrepreneur, teacher, and, in Japan, rock band member and actor in television commercials and gangster films.
In 1989 Reiss returned to Texas to study creative writing at the University of Houston, under the guidance of professor Donald Barthelme. When Barthelme died in summer 1989, Reiss left Texas and traveled to Germany in order to begin researching his family history, and became fascinated by the rapidly changing political and social context in East Germany after the Berlin Wall fell. In order to effectively search documents and communicate with German citizens, he taught himself the German language.
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