Jonathan Harr is an American writer, best known for the nonfiction work A Civil Action .
Jonathan Ensor Harr was born 13 September 1948, in Beloit, Wisconsin, the son of John Ensor Harr (1 August 1926–14 November 2004), [1] a U.S. diplomat. Harr lived in France, Germany, Israel, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Harr attended the College of William and Mary, but left in 1968 to serve as a VISTA volunteer in Appalachia. He later attended Marshall University. [2]
Harr lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he has taught nonfiction writing at Smith College. In 2008 he was writer-in-residence at the University of Chicago. [3]
He is a former staff writer at New England Monthly and has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine . [4]
Harr spent approximately seven and a half years researching and writing A Civil Action, [5] which was published in 1995, and subsequently nominated for a National Book Award, and awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award. John Travolta and Robert Duvall starred in the film of the same name, and Robert Redford was on the production team. Harr later wrote The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece in 2005, which became a best seller. The New York Times named it one of the ten best books of 2005. [6]
Saul Bellow was an American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.
John Tracy Kidder is an American writer of nonfiction books. He received the Pulitzer Prize for his The Soul of a New Machine (1981), about the creation of a new computer at Data General Corporation. He has received praise and awards for other works, including his biography of Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist, titled Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003).
Cornelius Mahoney Sheehan was an American journalist. As a reporter for The New York Times in 1971, Sheehan obtained the classified Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg. His series of articles revealed a secret United States Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War and led to a U.S. Supreme Court case, New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), which invalidated the United States government's use of a restraining order to halt publication.
John Davison Rockefeller Jr. was an American financier and philanthropist. Rockefeller was the fifth child and only son of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller. He was involved in the development of the vast office complex in Midtown Manhattan known as Rockefeller Center, making him one of the largest real estate holders in the city. Towards the end of his life, he was famous for his philanthropy, donating over $500 million to a wide variety of different causes, including educational establishments. Among his projects was the reconstruction of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. He was widely blamed for having orchestrated the Ludlow Massacre and other offenses during the Colorado Coalfield War. Rockefeller was the father of six children: Abby, John III, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and David.
The Taking of Christ is a painting, of the arrest of Jesus, by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Originally commissioned by the Roman nobleman Ciriaco Mattei in 1602, it is housed in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
New England Monthly was a magazine published in the Haydenville Historic District, of Williamsburg, Massachusetts, from 1984 to 1990.
The Supper at Emmaus is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, executed in 1601, and now in London. It depicts the Gospel story of the resurrected Jesus's appearance in Emmaus.
Patricia Pearson is a Canadian writer and journalist. She has published two novels and several works of nonfiction.
The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece is a 2005 non-fiction book by the author of A Civil Action, Jonathan Harr. The book traces the recent discovery of a Caravaggio painting, by comparing two copies of the painting and trying to figure out which one is the original The Taking of Christ. The book is an extension of an article that first appeared in The New York Times. One of the people whose life is recounted in the book is the Oxford philosopher and ontologist of the infosphere Luciano Floridi.
John Thomas Spike is an American art historian, curator, and author, specializing in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods. He is also a contemporary art critic and past director of the Florence Biennale.
Sir John Denis Mahon, was a British collector and historian of Italian art. Considered to be one of the few art collectors who was also a respected scholar, he is generally credited, alongside Sacheverell Sitwell and Tancred Borenius, with bringing Italian pre-Baroque and Baroque painters to the attention of English-speaking audiences, reversing the critical aversion to their work that had prevailed from the time of John Ruskin.
The non-fiction novel is a literary genre that, broadly speaking, depicts non-fictional elements, such as real historical figures and actual events, woven together with fictitious conversations and uses the storytelling techniques of fiction. The non-fiction novel is an otherwise loosely defined and flexible genre. The genre is sometimes referred to using the slang term "faction", a portmanteau of the words fact and fiction.
James Vincent Sheean was an American journalist and novelist.
Robert Duane Loomis was an American book editor who worked at Random House from 1957 until his retirement in 2011. He has been called "one of publishing's hall of fame editors."
Robert A. Kurson is an American author, best known for his 2004 bestselling book, Shadow Divers, the true story of two Americans who discover a World War II German U-boat sunk 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey.
Chris Turner is a Canadian journalist and author.
Isabel Wilkerson is an African-American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
A Civil Action is a 1995 non-fiction book by Jonathan Harr about a water contamination case in Woburn, Massachusetts, in the 1980s. The book became a best-seller. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.
The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist is an oil painting by the Italian artist Caravaggio. Measuring 3.7 m by 5.2 m, it depicts the execution of John the Baptist. It is located in the Oratory of St. John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta, Malta.
Francesca Cappelletti is an Italian art history professor known for verifying the authenticity of the Caravaggio painting The Taking of Christ with Laura Testa while they were students at the University of Rome.
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