Фрэнсис Фитцджеральд: Жизнь и творчество американского журналиста и историка

American journalist and historian

Frances FitzGerald (born October 21, 1940) is an American journalist and historian, who is primarily known for Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972), an account of the Vietnam War. It was a bestseller that won the Pulitzer Prize, Bancroft Prize, and National Book Award.

Frances FitzGerald was born in New York City, the only daughter of Desmond FitzGerald, an attorney on Wall Street, and socialite Marietta Peabody. and from an early age, FitzGerald was introduced to a wide range of political figures. Her parents divorced shortly after World War II. From 1950 to his death in 1967, her father was an intelligence officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, becoming a deputy director. As a teenager, FitzGerald wrote voluminous letters to Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, her mother's lover, expressing her opinion on many subjects, a reflection of her deep interest in world affairs. She graduated from Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia, and magna cum laude from Radcliffe College, then a women's college associated with Harvard University.

FitzGerald became a journalist, initially writing for the New York Herald Tribune magazine. She went to South Vietnam in January 1966. She met Washington Post journalist Ward Just at a party soon after arriving in Saigon and began a relationship with him that continued until she left South Vietnam in November 1966. She formed a close connection with Daniel Ellsberg who was working as an intelligence officer at the U. S. Embassy. She returned to South Vietnam in early 1974 one year after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords and twice crossed over into Vietcong controlled territory, filing stories for The New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly. She travelled to Hanoi in late 1974 and stayed in North Vietnam into early January 1975, writing a 23 page article for the New Yorker. a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth (2002). In 1987, FitzGerald received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member Robert K. Massie. Her book Cities on a Hill includes a chapter on Rajneeshpuram, whose rise and fall in the 1980s in Oregon is the subject of the documentary Wild Wild Country. Her book, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, published in 2017, is a history of the evangelical movement, its central figures, and its long reaching influence upon American history, politics, and culture. The Evangelicals was shortlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for nonfiction. FitzGerald has also written numerous articles, which have been published in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Architectural Digest, and Rolling Stone. Her "Rewriting American history" was published in The Norton Reader. She serves on the editorial boards of The Nation and Foreign Policy magazines. She also serves as vice president of International PEN.

FitzGerald is married to James P. Sterba, a former writer for The Wall Street Journal. They live in New York City and Maine. Sterba featured the latter in his 2003 book Frankie's Place: A Love Story.