Lawrence Wright Was Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1947, and Spent Most of His Childhood

Lawrence Wright Biography

Lawrence Wright was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1947, and spent most of his childhood in Dallas, Texas. He is a graduate of Tulane University, in New Orleans, Lousiana, and the American University in Cairo, where he taught English and received an M.A. in Applied Linguistics in 1969. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1971, Wright began his writing career at the Race Relations Reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Two years later, he went to work for Southern Voices, a publication of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, Georgia, and began to freelance for various national magazines. In 1980, Wright returned to Texas to work for Texas Monthly. He also became a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. In December 1992, he became a staff writer for The New Yorker. That same year he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Wright has published six books. City Children, Country Summer, (Scribner’s, 1979) is about the Fresh Air Fund, a charity in New York City that sends ghetto children to live with farm families during the summer. In the New World: Growing Up with America, 1960 - 1984 (Knopf, 1988) is a memoir that looks back at Dallas during the Kennedy assassination and America during the Vietnam war.

Saints & Sinners (Knopf, 1993) is a collection of profiles of six religious leaders: Walker Railey, Jimmy Swaggart, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Anton LaVey, Will Campbell, and Matthew Fox. Remembering Satan (Knopf, 1994) examines a mysterious case in Olympia, Washington, of a man who remembered committing crimes that didn’t actually occur. It addresses the controversy of "recovered memories." Most of that book appeared in The New Yorker in 1993, and won the National Magazine Award for Reporting, as well as the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism. Twins: Genes, Environment, and the Mystery of Identity was published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson in London in November 1997 and by Wiley & Sons in New York in January 1998. His first novel, God’s Favorite, was published by Simon & Schuster in March 2000.

He is currently writing a definitive account of the September 11th attacks for Knopf. A part of that book, on Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number-two man in Al-Qaeda, appeared in the September 16, 2002, New Yorker, titled, "The Man Behind Bin Laden." It won the 2002 Overseas Press Club Award for magazine reporting.

Wright has written movie scripts for Sydney Pollack, Jane Fonda, and Oliver Stone. He is the co-writer (with Ed Zwick and Menno Meyjes) of The Siege, starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, and Annette Benning, which appeared in November 1998. He also wrote the script of the Showtime movie, Noriega: God’s Favorite, directed by Roger Spottiswoode and starring Bob Hoskins, which aired in April 2000. Currently he is working on a script for director David Fincher about the friendship of Martin Scorcese and Robbie Robertson. He is also writing a script for MGM on the life of John O’Neill, the former head of counterterrorism for the FBI, whom Wright profiled for The New Yorker in January 2002.

Wright lives in Austin with his wife, Roberta. They have two children. Wright is active in civic affairs, having founded Texas Writers Month, as well as Capital Area Statues, Inc. (CAST), which in 1995 erected Philsopher’s Rock, the statue of J. Frank Dobie, Roy Bedichek, and Walter Prescott Webb at Austin’s famed Barton Springs. He is also the keyboard player in a blues band, Who Do.