Garry Wills is a prolific Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalist, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, as well as the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Wills has written nearly forty books and since 1973 has been a frequent reviewer for the New York Review of Books. He joined the faculty of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is currently an Emeritus Professor of History. Wills was born in Atlanta, Georgia and grew up in Michigan and Wisconsin, graduating from Campion High School, a Jesuit institution, in Prairie du... Chien, Wisconsin in 1951. He entered and then left the Jesuit order. He earned a B.A. in philosophy from Saint Louis University in 1957 and an M.A. from Xavier University in 1958. Both his B.A. and his M.A. were in philosophy. William F. Buckley, Jr. hired him as a drama critic for National Review magazine at the age of 23. He received his PhD in classics from Yale University in 1961, and taught history at Johns Hopkins University from 1962 to 1980. Wills has been married to Natalie Wills since 1959: she was the stewardess on his first flight on an aeroplane.
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