Barry Werth


Barry Werth is an American author and journalist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, the Smithsonian, and the MIT Technology Review. He has also served as an instructor in journalism at Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and Boston University.
Werth received a Stonewall Book Award in 2002 for The Scarlet Professor, his biography of Newton Arvin, a literary critic who was publicly forced into retirement in 1960 during an anti-pornography drive by the US Post Office. The book was later adapted into the documentary film The Great Pink Scare, and as a 2017 opera by Eric Sawyer and Harley Erdman based on Werth's book.
His book Damages is commonly used as a case study for teaching medical malpractice in law schools.