Rick Atkinson
Please feel free to
contact Rick
 Rick
Atkinson is at work on volume 3 of his trilogy about the role of
the U.S. military in the liberation of Europe in World War II, which is
tentatively scheduled for publication in 2011 or 2012. He is on extended
book leave from The Washington Post, where his most recent
assignments were covering the 101st Airborne Division during
the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and writing about roadside bombs in Iraq
and Afghanistan in 2007. Previously he served as the assistant managing
editor for investigations, a position that gave him responsibility for
investigative reporting at the newspaper. Atkinson’s journalism career
began at The Pittsburg (Kansas) Morning Sun in
1976; in 1977, he moved to The Kansas City Times. In 1983,
he joined the national staff of The Washington Post as a general
assignment reporter. He subsequently served as deputy national editor
supervising national security coverage; as an investigative reporter;
and as the newspaper’s Berlin bureau chief, covering not only Germany
and NATO, but also spending considerable time in Somalia and Bosnia. He
returned from Europe to become assistant managing editor in 1996, before
leaving in 1999 to write about World War II.
Born in Munich, in the Federal Republic of Germany, Atkinson is the son of a
U.S. Army officer and grew up on military posts. He holds a master of arts
degree in English literature from the University of Chicago. He is the
best-selling author of The Long Gray Line, a narrative account about West
Point’s class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf
War; and An Army at Dawn, the first volume
in the Liberation Trilogy, a narrative
history of the American Army in North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe during
the Second World War. The Wall Street Journal called it “the best World
War II battle narrative since Cornelius Ryan’s classics, The Longest Day
and A Bridge Too Far.” His book about the 101st Airborne
Division in Iraq, In the Company of
Soldiers, was published in March 2004. The New York Times Book Review
called it “the most intimate, vivid and well-informed account yet published”
on that war, and Newsweek cited it as one of the ten best books of 2004.
The second volume of the Liberation Trilogy, The
Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, was published in
Oct. 2007. The New York Times called it “a triumph of narrative history,
elegantly written…and rooted in the sight and sounds of battle.”
Atkinson’s awards include the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting; the
1999 Pulitzer Prize for public service, awarded to The Post for a series
of investigative articles directed and edited by Atkinson on shootings by the
District of Columbia police department; the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for history; and
the 1989 George Polk Award for national reporting. For the 2004-2005 academic
year, Atkinson was the Gen. Omar N. Bradley Chair of Strategic Leadership at the
U.S. Army War College and Dickinson College.
He and his wife, Dr. Jane C. Atkinson, a researcher and clinician at the
National Institutes of Health, live in the District of Columbia. They have two
grown children.
In the
Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat is his first-person account
from the Iraqi battlefield, and an intimate, fresh view of our modern soldiers
in action.
|
