Michael Lewis

Michael Monroe Lewis was born in New Orleans to J. Thomas Lewis and Diana Monroe Lewis; his father was an attorney and his mother a community activist and lawyer, and he attended Isidore Newman School in New Orleans. He earned a bachelor’s degree in art history from Princeton University and later studied at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he deepened his interest in economics and finance. After graduate study Lewis worked as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s; his experiences there became the basis for his breakout book Liar’s Poker (1989), a semi-autobiographical account of the culture and excesses of 1980s Wall Street that established his voice as a narrative nonfiction writer about markets and institutions. Over the 1990s and 2000s Lewis broadened his subjects: The New New Thing (1999) explored Silicon Valley entrepreneurship; Moneyball (2003) examined baseball’s use of statistics and reshaped public conversation about analytics in sports; The Blind Side (2006) examined football and opportunity; and The Big Short (2010) chronicled the causes and actors behind the 2007–08 financial crisis. Several books were adapted into major films (The Blind Side; The Big Short), amplifying his cultural impact. In later books Lewis turned to behavioral science and public health: The Undoing Project (2016) told the story of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and helped popularize behavioral economics concepts, and The Premonition (2021) examined public-health failures during pandemics through narrative portraits of individuals who tried to avert catastrophe. He has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and continues to publish essays and longer works that combine deep reporting with storytelling to explain social, economic and institutional problems.