Department of English

• Monday, December 2, 2019 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm

Kelly Writers House | 3805 Locust Walk | Arts Cafe

Two time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and bestselling author DAVID MARANISS will join us at the Writers House for a conversation on Monday, December 2, at 6:00 PM, hosted by Paul Hendrickson. Maraniss’ twelfth and newest publication is A GOOD AMERICAN FAMILY: THE RED SCARE AND MY FATHER, in which he examines the politics of the 1950s McCarthy era, a time of fear, paranoia, and injustice. It is also a powerful personal story of Maraniss’s father, Elliott Maraniss, a World War II veteran who had commanded an all-black company in the Pacific, was spied on by the FBI, named as a communist by an informant, called before the House of Un-American Activities Committee, fired from his newspaper job, and blacklisted for five years. If you’d like to join us, please RSVP by emailing wh@writing.upenn.edu or by calling 215-746-POEM.

DAVID MARANISS is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History). A Good American Family is his twelfth book. Visit him at www.DavidMaraniss.com.