George Packer is an American journalist, novelist, and playwright. He is best known for his writings for The New Yorker and The Atlantic about U.S. foreign policy and for his book '. Packer also wrote The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, covering the history of America from 1978 to 2012. In November 2013, The Unwinding received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His latest book ' was released in May 2019.
Early life and education
Packer was born in Santa Clara, California. His parents taught at Stanford University: his mother, Nancy Packer, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in the Creative Writing Program and later professor of English, and his father, Herbert L. Packer, was a distinguished professor of law, and the author of numerous books and articles. Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, Sr., had served eleven successive terms representing Alabama's 9th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. His uncle, George Huddleston, Jr., succeeded to his father's seat in the House of Representatives from 1954 to 1964. Packer's sister, Ann Packer, also is a writer. Their father's background was Jewish and their mother's Christian. Packer is married to writer and editor Laura Secor and was married to Michele Millon. Packer graduated from Yale College in 1982, where he resided at Calhoun College. He served in the Peace Corps in Togo.
Career
His essays and articles have appeared in Boston Review, The Nation, World Affairs, Harper's, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among other publications. Packer was a columnist for Mother Jones and was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 2003 to 2018. He now writes for The Atlantic. Packer was a Holtzbrinck Fellow Class of Fall 2009 at the American Academy in Berlin. His 2005 book entitled ' analyzes the events that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and reports on subsequent developments in that country, largely based on interviews with ordinary Iraqis. He was a supporter of the Iraq war. He was a finalist for the 2004 Michael Kelly Award. In July 2013 the New Yorker Festival released a video entitled Geoffrey Canada on Giving Voice to the Have-nots, of a panel that was moderated by George Packer. Along with Canada, the panelists included Abhijit Banerjee, Katherine Boo, and Jose Antonio Vargas. ', focuses on the ways that America changed in the years between 1978 and 2012. The book achieves this mainly by tracing the lives of various individuals from different backgrounds through the years. Interspersed are capsule biographies of influential figures of the time such as Colin Powell, Newt Gingrich, Elizabeth Warren, Jay-Z, and Raymond Carver. In 2019, Packer released a 600-page book titled Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century. It's a full-scale scholarly biography of one of the most influential U.S. diplomats of the Bill Clinton era.
