Jane Kramer

Jane Kramer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1964 and has written the Letter from Europe since 1981.

Before joining the magazine, Kramer was a staff writer for the Village Voice; her first book, “Off Washington Square,” is a collection of her articles from that paper. Her first long pieces for The New Yorker became the books “Allen Ginsberg in America” (1969) and “Honor to the Bride” (1970), which was based on her experiences in Morocco in the late nineteen-sixties.

Since 1970, most of Kramer’s work for the magazine has covered aspects of European culture, politics, and social history. Many of these articles have been collected in three books: “Unsettling Europe” (1980); “Europeans” (1988), which won the Prix Européen de l’Essai “Charles Veillon” and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction; and “The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany” (1996).

A notable exception to Kramer’s European reporting was her Profile, from 1977, of the pseudonymous Texan Henry Blanton. It was later published as a book, “The Last Cowboy” (1977), which won the American Book Award for nonfiction. Parts of her book “Lone Patriot” (2002), on the right-wing American militia leader John Pitner, also first appeared in the magazine. Her article on multiculturalism and political correctness, “Whose Art Is It?,” won the 1993 National Magazine Award for feature writing and was published as a book, in 1994.

Her most recent book, “The Reporter’s Kitchen,” (2017) is a collection of her food writing for The New Yorker.