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Few, if any, historians have brought such insight, wisdom, and empathy to public discourse as Jill Lepore. Arriving at
The New Yorker in 2005, Lepore, with her panoptical range and razor-sharp style, brought a transporting freshness and a literary vivacity to everything from profiles of long-dead writers to urgent constitutional analysis to an unsparing scrutiny of the woeful affairs of the nation itself. The astonishing essays collected in
The Deadline offer a prismatic portrait of Americans' techno-utopianism, frantic fractiousness, and unprecedented-but armed-aimlessness. From lockdowns and race commissions to Bratz dolls and bicycles, to the losses that haunt Lepore's life, these essays again and again cross what she calls the
deadline, the "river of time that divides the quick from the dead." Echoing Gore Vidal's
United States in its massive intellectual erudition,
The Deadline, with its remarkable juxtaposition of the political and the personal, challenges the very nature of the essay-and of history-itself.
About the author
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and professor of law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at
The New Yorker. Her many books include the international bestseller
These Truths: A History of the United States. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
