Jill Lepore

Lepore was born on August 27, 1966, and grew up in Wes Boylston. Her father was a junior high school principal who met her mother when he hired her as an art teacher. Continuing her education was a decision made under her mother’s requirement and was subject to receiving a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps scholarship to Tufts University. She then switched to English a year later. After graduating from Tufts University, she worked as a secretary at Harvard, where she audited history classes, which was a decision affected by a letter written by teenage-Lepore to college-student-Lepore in which teenage -Lepore prompted her to stop wasting time and face her real passion. She then enrolled at the University of Michigan and transferred to Yale where she specialized in the history of early America,
after earning her Ph.D. from Yale, Lepore became a professor, moving around universities. She eventually ended up at Harvard to help lead the department whose classes she once audited.

She produced seven academic works, compiled a collection of essays (her writer’s page on The New Yorker website is 30 pages long), and co-penned a novel. Her signature work These Truths: A History of the United States provides a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation, an urgently needed reckoning with the beauty and tragedy of American history. The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice commended it as“This sweeping, sobering account of the American past is a story not of relentless progress but of conflict and contradiction, with crosscurrents of reason and faith, black and white, immigrant and native, industry and agriculture rippling through a narrative that is far from completion.”

Lepore explores a lot about the relationship between a story and a statement of truth. Literature and history, she says, have, respectively “the truth of the universal and the truth of the particular.” In her essay “Just the Facts, Ma’am,” she states that “every history is incomplete; every historian has a point of view; every historian relies on what is unreliable–documents written by people who were not under oath and cannot be cross-examined.” She tries to resolve these contradictions by “squeeze as much as we can out of letters...pushing as far as we can go”, digging into previously overlooked documents and perspectives.