After graduating from the
University of Wisconsin–Madison, Darnton joined
The New York Times as a
copyboy in 1966. Two years later, he became a reporter and for the next eight years he worked in and around
New York City, including stints as the
Connecticut correspondent during the
Black Panther trials in
New Haven, and as a City Hall reporter in the
Lindsay and
Beame administrations. In 1976, he went abroad as a foreign correspondent, first covering Africa out of
Lagos,
Nigeria, and then, when the military government there expelled him in 1977, out of
Nairobi,
Kenya. He covered protests in
South Africa, liberation movements in
Rhodesia, guerrilla fighting in
Ethiopia,
Somalia,
Zaire, and the fall of
Idi Amin in
Uganda. His work in Africa earned him the
George Polk Award in 1978. In 1979, based in
Warsaw, Poland, he covered
Eastern Europe for the
Times and received both the Polk Award and the 1982
Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his coverage of
Poland under martial law and the rise of the
Solidarity movement (he had to smuggle dispatches out of the country). He went on to become the bureau chief in
Madrid and
London and also served as the deputy foreign editor, the metropolitan editor, and the cultural news editor at the
Times. He retired from the
Times in 2005. ==Novels==