Alec Wilkinson

Alec Wilkinson began writing for The New Yorker in 1980, after working as a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and as a rock-and-roll musician. He has contributed pieces under the Talk of the Town, Comment, Reporter at Large, and Profile rubrics and is the author of ten books, most of which grew out of articles first published in the magazine. They include “Midnights”; “A Violent Act”; “My Mentor,” about his long friendship with, and training at the hands of, the novelist and short-story writer William Maxwell, who was a fiction editor at The New Yorker for forty years; “Mr. Apology”; “The Happiest Man in the World,” a portrait of David Pearlman, a bohemian vagabond who built a raft from found objects in New York and sailed it across the North Atlantic; “The Protest Singer,” a biography of Pete Seeger; and “The Ice Balloon,” about the Swedish aeronaut S. A. Andrée, who in 1897 tried to fly to the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon and later became one of the first people in the world to be lost in the air. Wilkinson’s awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and a Lyndhurst Fellowship Prize. His most recent book, “A Divine Language,” was published in 2022.