Wright, Lawrence 1947- (Lawrence George Wright)

PERSONAL:

Born August 2, 1947, in Oklahoma City, OK; son of John Donald (a banker) and Dorothy Ann Wright; married Roberta Gordon Murphy, January 22, 1970; children: John Gordon, Caroline. Education: Tulane University, B.A., 1969; American University of Cairo, M.A., 1971.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Andrew Wylie, The Wylie Agency, 250 W. 57th St., Ste. 2114, New York, NY 10107.

CAREER:

Writer, journalist, screenwriter, playwright, educator, musician, and editor. Race Relations Reporter, Nashville, TN, staff writer, 1971-72; Southern Voices, South Regional Council, Atlanta, GA, writer, 1974; New Times, writer, 1976-78; Texas Monthly, staff writer, became contributing editor, 1980-92; Rolling Stone, staff member, 1985-92; New Yorker, staff writer, 1992—. Worked as an English teacher at American University, Cairo, 1969-71. Writer-in-residence at University of Georgia, 1976. Member of Council on Foreign Relations. Keyboard player in blues band, Who Do.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Olive Branch Award, New York University, for international reporting; National Magazine Award for reporting; John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism; Ed Cunningham Award, Overseas Press Club, 2002, for best magazine reporting; O'Henry Award for Best Work of Magazine Journalism, Texas Institute of Letters, 2005; Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, Los Angeles Times prize for history, National Book Award for nonfiction finalist, Lionel Gelber Award, and J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, all 2006, all for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

City Children, Country Summer, Scribner (New York, NY), 1979.

In the New World: Growing up with America, 1960-1984, Knopf (New York, NY), 1987, published as In the New World: Growing up with America from the Sixties to the Eighties, Vintage (New York, NY), 1989.

Saints and Sinners: Walker Railey, Jimmy Swaggert, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Anton LaVey, Will Campbell, Matthew Fox, Knopf (New York, NY), 1993.

Remembering Satan: A Case of Recovered Memory and the Shattering of an American Family, Knopf (New York, NY), 1994.

Twins: Their Remarkable Double Lives—and What They Tell Us about Who We Are, J. Wiley (New York, NY), 1997, published as Twins: Genes, Environment, and the Mystery of Human Identity, Phoenix (London, England), 1998.

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Knopf (New York, NY), 2006, adapted for the stage as My Trip to al-Qaeda (one-man show), produced in Austin, TX, 2007

OTHER

The Siege (screenplay), 20th Century Fox, 1998.

Noriega: God's Favorite (screenplay), Showtime, 2000.

God's Favorite (novel), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2000.

Also author of the plays Cracker Jack and Sonny's Last Shot.

SIDELIGHTS:

Lawrence Wright is a New Yorker staff writer who has published both nonfiction and fiction. He was born in Oklahoma City in 1947, and he graduated from Tulane University in 1969. He then attended the American University of Cairo, where he earned a master's degree in 1971. That same year Wright began writing for the Race Relations Reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1976, four years after leaving the Reporter, Wright served as writer-in-residence at the University of Georgia. He eventually joined the staff of the New Yorker, where he distinguished himself with various nonfiction pieces, including an article on twins.

In 1979 Wright published City Children, Country Summer. Eight years passed before he produced a second book, In the New World: Growing up with America, 1960-1984, and six more years elapsed before he issued a third work, Saints and Sinners: Walker Railey, Jimmy Swaggert, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Anton LaVey, Will Campbell, Matthew Fox.

In 1994 Wright published another nonfiction volume, Remembering Satan: Recovered Memory and the Shattering of a Family. Based on an incident sordid enough to make the rounds of daytime talk television, Remembering Satan focuses on the family of Washington State chief deputy Paul Ingram as charges of incest and satanic practices brought against him by his two daughters spun into a tangled web of created memories that resulted in a twenty-year prison sentence. As New Statesman & Society contributor Janet Gorman explained, in his book Wright "charts the disastrous effects of … suggestion on susceptible individuals. What had initially been a ‘problem’—a decision between two conflicting versions of events—blossomed into an investigation that lasted for many months and cost three quarters of a million dollars. By the time Ingram finished confessing, he was ‘remembering’ not only incidents of sexual abuse with his children but also grotesque satanic practices involving friends, colleagues and even police dogs. Wright demonstrates convincingly that ‘the source of the memories was the investigation itself—there was no other reality.’" Calling Wright's prose "clean and precise," Matthew E. Bienik added in Christian Century that Remembering Satan "is more than the account of a single case; it is also an exploitation of public fascination with satanic ritual abuse, and the conflict in the courts, media and among mental-health professionals concerning the validity of recovered memories."

Wright followed Remembering Satan with Twins: Their Remarkable Double Lives—and What They Tell Us about Who We Are, which was based on research the author did for a New Yorker piece on the same subject. In the book, Wright relates a range of similarities and differences with regard to twins. In addition, he explores personal and social perceptions of individuality. Booklist reviewer Kathy Broderick proclaimed Twins a "truly fascinating but sometimes spooky study," while in the Manchester Guardian, Jerome Burne saw Wright's purpose as "to undermine the whole basis of twin research" by marshaling facts that show that the link between genes and character traits is far more complex than had been assumed.

In 2000, Wright produced his first novel, God's Favorite, which relates political and religious intrigue in Panama during the U.S. invasion of 1989. The novel's notable characters include Father Jorge Ugarte, who rails against dictator Manuel Noriega's violent methods and ties to drug dealers; Monsenor Morette, Ugarte's mentor, whose schemes are described in Publishers Weekly as "Machiavellian"; and such historical figures as Vice President George Bush and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book "a memorable debut" and summarized it as an "edge-of-your-seat, often darkly comic tale."

Wright returned to nonfiction and his journalistic roots with The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, published in 2006. "In its simplest terms, this is the story of how a small group of men, with a frightening mix of delusion and calculation, rose from a tormented civilization to mount a catastrophic assault on the world's mightiest power, and how another group of men and women, convinced that such an attack was on the way, tried desperately to stop it," observed Dexter Filkins in the New York Times Book Review. Wright's work is a "coherent, exhaustively researched history of the essential characters and events that have shaped the new global order," remarked Andrew C. McCarthy, writing in the National Review. Based on five years of interviews and on-the-ground investigation in the Middle East, Wright weaves together the story of the major players in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He offers detailed profiles of Osama Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and their role in the founding and expansion of al Qaeda. He also looks at the ideological, political, and religious ideas at the base of their fundamentalism and hatred of America.

Wright traces the roots of modern Islamic fundamentalism, particularly in his portrait of Sayyid Qutb, a middle-aged Egyptian who came to America in the 1940s to study at the Colorado State College of Education in Greeley. There, Qutb was thoroughly shocked by what he saw as the scandal, the moral decay, and godlessness of American society. Qutb displayed conflicted feelings about women and sex, though he displayed a familiar form of Islamic misogyny as he developed his radical ideas. He left America in 1950, after developing a profound hatred for the United States and what he saw as its spiritual and moral failings. Later, Qutb was imprisoned and tortured for an assassination plot against Gamal Abdel Nasser, and was executed in 1966. His legacy, however, was a manifesto titled Milestones, which set out his vision in a manner similar to Lenin years before. Qutb became one of the milestone figures in the development of modern radical Islam. In the story of the defining experiences of Qutb and others, "Wright shows, correctly, that at the root of Islamic militancy—its anger, its antimodernity, its justifications for murder—lies a feeling of intense humiliation," Filkins observed.

In the months leading up to the 9/11 attacks, there were, Wright notes, several people trying their best to put together the disparate evidence and stop the attackers before they could accomplish their goal. Among them were FBI agent John O'Neill, a dedicated and strong-willed investigator who believed that al Qaeda was about to mount an attack. Yet O'Neill's abrasive personality, the slow-moving Washington bureaucracy, and the lack of cooperation between the FBI, CIA, and other agencies stymied O'Neill's investigation until it was too late. "O'Neill and others like him were in a race with Al Qaeda, and although we know how the race ended, it's astonishing—and heartbreaking—to learn how close it was," Filkins commented.

"Wright's research is exemplary, including dozens of primary-source interviews and first-person perspectives, and he provides welcome insight into the time line leading up to 9/11," commented Elizabeth Morris in Library Journal. Wright, stated a Publishers Weekly contributor, "brings exhaustive research and delightful prose to one of the best books yet on the history of terrorism." David Aikman, writing in Weekly Standard, remarked that "Wright's telling of the story is detailed, colorful, and insightful." A Kirkus Reviews contributor called Wright's book a "comprehensive and compelling account of the events preceding and causing 9/11, with a tight focus on al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and on the men who were pursuing him" prior to that infamous September day. Brendan Driscoll, writing in Booklist, stated that The Looming Tower "should be considered [among] the definitive works" on 9/11 and the Islamic fundamentalism and other causes that let up to it.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 1, 1994, Brenda Grazis, review of Remembering Satan: A Case of Recovered Memory and the Shattering of an American Family, p. 1409; February 1, 1998, Kathy Broderick, review of Twins: Their Remarkable Double Lives—and What They Tell Us about Who We Are, p. 878; August 1, 2006, Brendan Driscoll, review of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, p. 34.

California Bookwatch, November, 2006, review of The Looming Tower.

Choice, June, 1998, K.L. Hartlep, review of Twins, p. 1791.

Christian Century, August 24, 1994, Matthew E. Bienik, review of Remembering Satan, p. 791.

Commonweal, January 14, 1994, Catherine Walsh, review of Saints and Sinners, p. 34.

Daily Variety, January 5, 2007, Robert Hofler, "Lawrence Wright," profile of Lawrence Wright, p. S31.

Economist, March 10, 2007, "Voice of the Masses; One-Man Theatre," review of My Trip to al-Qaeda, p. 84.

Entertainment Weekly, April 29, 1994, Rhonda Johnson, review of Remembering Satan, p. 71; August 25, 2006, Jennifer Reese and Gilbert Cruz, "Looking Back on a Day of Infamy," review of The Looming Tower, p. 89.

Guardian (Manchester, England), November 4, 1997, Jerome Burne, "To the Power of Two," p. T13.

Houston Chronicle, August 10, 2006, Ronnie Crocker, "Terror's Turning Points," review of The Looming Tower.

Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2006, review of The Looming Tower, p. 566.

Library Journal, April 1, 1994, Mary Ann Hughes, review of Remembering Satan, p. 120; March 15, 2000, Harold Augenbraum, review of God's Favorite, p. 131; July 1, 2006, Elizabeth Morris, review of The Looming Tower, p. 96.

Military Review, January-February, 2007, William Latham, review of The Looming Tower, p. 116.

National Review, September 11, 2006, Andrew C. McCarthy, "The Long War," review of The Looming Tower, p. 46.

Nature, March 5, 1998, John Galloway, review of Twins, p. 32.

New Republic, April 18, 1988, Louis Menand, review of In the New World, p. 34.

New Statesman & Society, August 26, 1994, Janet Gorman, review of Remembering Satan, p. 37.

Newsweek, April 4, 1994, Malcolm Jones, Jr., review of Remembering Satan, p. 59.

New York Times Book Review, August 6, 2006, Dexter Filkins, "The Plot against America," review of The Looming Tower, p. 1.

Publishers Weekly, March 7, 1994, review of Remembering Satan, p. 60; January 24, 2000, review of Noriega: God's Favorite, p. 390; June 19, 2006, review of The Looming Tower, p. 56.

Reference & Research Book News, November, 2006, review of The Looming Tower.

Time, May 16, 1994, John Skow, review of Remembering Satan, p. 86; December 25, 2006, Steve Koepp and Mark Thompson, "The Real War," transcript of roundtable with Lawrence Wright, p. 158.

Times Literary Supplement, December 2, 1994, Peter Lomas, review of Remembering Satan, p. 13; August 7, 1998, R.G. John Turner, review of Twins, p. 15.

Weekly Standard, November 13, 2006, David Aikman, "Gathering Storm: How 9/11 Changed Everything, Except al Qaeda," review of The Looming Tower.

ONLINE

Blogcritics,http://www.blogcritic.org/ (September 3, 2006), Mayank Austen Soofi, review of The Looming Tower.

Huffington Post,http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ (March 9, 2007), Ankush Khardori, "Stage Wright: His Trip to Al Qaeda, and why Lawrence Wright Is Still Very, Very Scared," interview with Lawrence Wright.

Lawrence Wright Home Page,http://www.lawrencewright.com (May 16, 2007).