Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright is "an author and screenwriter, and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine," his biography at LawrenceWright.com states. "Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and "also serves as the keyboard player in the Austin-based blues band, Who Do."

Wright's most recent book, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11", was published August 2006 by Knopf. "A portion of that book, 'The Man Behind Bin Laden,' was published in The New Yorker and won the 2002 Overseas Press Club’s Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine reporting." 

Profiles
According to his LawrenceWright.com biography, Wright is "a graduate of Tulane University, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the American University in Cairo, where he taught English and received an M.A. in Applied Linguistics in 1969. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1971, Wright began his writing career at the Race Relations Reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Two years later, he went to work for Southern Voices, a publication of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, Georgia, and began to freelance for various national magazines. In 1980, Wright returned to Texas to work for Texas Monthly. He also became a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. In December, 1992, he joined the staff of The New Yorker.

"Wright has published six books. City Children, Country Summer (Scribner's, 1979), In the New World: Growing Up with America, 1960 - 1984 (Knopf, 1988), Saints & Sinners (Knopf, 1993), Remembering Satan (Knopf, 1994), Twins: Genes, Environment, and the Mystery of Identity (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997; Wiley & Sons, 1998), and God's Favorite (Simon & Schuster, 2000)."

Wright "also won the National Magazine Award for Reporting as well as the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism.

"Wright is the co-writer (with Ed Zwick and Menno Meyjes) of The Siege, starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis and Annette Bening, which appeared in November 1998. He also wrote the script of the Showtime movie, Noriega: God's Favorite, directed by Roger Spottiswoode and starring Bob Hoskins, which aired in April 2000. Currently he is working on a script for MGM about John O'Neill, the former head of the FBI's office of counterterrorism in New York, who died on 9/11."

By Lawrence Wright

 * "The Master Plan. For the new theorists of jihad, Al Qaeda is just the beginning," The New Yorker, posted September 4, 2006; September 11, 2006, issue.

Articles & Commentary

 * Filmography: Lawrence Wright, IMdB.com.