Rick Atkinson

Atkinson was born in Munich to Margaret (née Howe) and Larry Atkinson, who was a U.S. Army officer. Turning down an appointment to West Point, for a "body of work" that included a series about the West Point class of 1966, which lost more men in Vietnam than any other Military Academy class. He also contributed to the newspaper's coverage of the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse in Kansas City, Missouri, for which the paper's staff in 1982 was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for local spot news reporting. In November 1983, Atkinson was hired as a reporter on the national staff of The Washington Post. He wrote about defense issues, the 1984 presidential election. He covered Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman vice-presidential candidate for a major party, and national topics. In 1985, he became deputy national editor, overseeing coverage of defense, diplomacy, and intelligence. In 1988, he returned to reporting as a member of the Post investigative staff, writing about public housing in the District of Columbia and the secret history of Project Senior C.J., which became the B-2 stealth bomber. In 1991, he was the newspaper's lead writer during the Persian Gulf War. In 1993, he joined the foreign staff as bureau chief in Berlin, covering Germany and NATO and spending time in Somalia and Bosnia. He returned from Europe in 1996 to become assistant managing editor for investigations; in that role, he headed a seven-member team that for more than a year scrutinized shootings by the District of Columbia police department, resulting in "Deadly Force," a series for which the Post was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. In 1999, Atkinson left the newspaper world to write about World War II, an interest that began with his birth in Germany and was rekindled during his three-year tour in Berlin. He twice rejoined the Post, first in 2003 when for two months he accompanied General David Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq, and again in 2007 when he made trips to Iraq and Afghanistan while writing "Left of Boom", an investigative series about roadside bombs in modern warfare, which won the Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense. He held the Omar N. Bradley Chair of Strategic Leadership at the United States Army War College and Dickinson College in 2004–2005, and remains an adjunct faculty member at the war college. Atkinson is a presidential counselor at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, a member of the Society of American Historians, and an inductee in the American Academy of Achievement, for which he also serves as a board member. He formerly served on the governing commission of the National Portrait Gallery. Atkinson is married and has two children. ==Works==

Atkinson's first book, written while on leave from the Post, was ''The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966. A 1989 review in Time magazine called it "brilliant history", and Business Week'' reviewer Dave Griffiths called it "the best book out of Vietnam to date". In 1993, Atkinson wrote Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War. In a review, The Wall Street Journal wrote, "No one could have been better prepared to write a book on Desert Storm, and Atkinson's Crusade does full justice to the opportunity." and Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction bestseller lists. A review in The New York Times called the book "a tapestry of fabulous richness and complexity...Atkinson is a master of what might be called 'pointillism history,' assembling the small dots of pure color into a vivid, tumbling narrative ... The Liberation Trilogy is a monumental achievement." As a result of his time with Gen. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne, Atkinson wrote In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat, which The New York Times Book Review called "intimate, vivid, and well-informed", and which Newsweek cited as one of the ten best books of 2004. Atkinson was the lead essayist in Where Valor Rests: Arlington National Cemetery, published by the National Geographic Society in 2007. He is the editor and introductory essayist for an anthology of work by the journalist and military historian Cornelius Ryan published by Library of America in May 2019. In May 2019, the first book in the Revolution Trilogy, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777, was published by Henry Holt and edited, as all of Atkinson's books have been, by John Sterling. The New York Times selected The British Are Coming for its 100 Notable Books of 2019. It won the 2020 George Washington Book Prize. Reviewer Joseph J. Ellis, writing on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, wrote, "To say that Atkinson can tell a story is like saying Sinatra can sing." The second volume of the Revolution Trilogy, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, was published in April 2025, and debuted at number one on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. A review in the New York Times Book Review by Amy S. Greenberg, head of the history department at Penn State University, stated, "There is no better writer of narrative history than the Pulitzer Prize-winning Atkinson, who is able to transport readers to a different time and place without minimizing the differences of the past from the present." Reviewer C.W. Goodyear wrote in the Washington Post, "Atkinson writes with tremendous verve and detail. The result is a book that infuses the events and leaders of the war with striking vibrancy, essentially bringing the conflict to life again." Atkinson also appears repeatedly in the 2025 Ken Burns' documentary, The American Revolution. Burns has written that "Rick Atkinson takes his place among the greatest of all historians." In 2019, Atkinson was named a Vincent J. Dooley Distinguished Fellow by the Georgia Historical Society, an honor that recognizes national leaders in the field of history as both writers and educators whose research has enhanced or changed the way the public understands the past. ==Awards and honors==

• 1982 Pulitzer Prize, National Reporting • 1989 George Polk Award for National Reporting • 1999 Pulitzer Prize for public service, awarded to The Post for articles on shootings by the District of Columbia police department • 2003 Pulitzer Prize in History, An Army at Dawn • 2003 Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award • 2008 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement • 2009 Axel Springer Prize and fellowship, the American Academy, Berlin • 2010 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing • 2014 Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement, Society for Military History • 2015 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award • 2019 Vincent J. Dooley Distinguished Teaching Fellow, awarded by the Georgia Historical Society • 2020 George Washington Book Prize The British Are Coming, for the year's best work on the American founding era • 2020 New-York Historical Society Barbara and David Zalaznick Prize in American History, The British Are Coming, for the year's best work in American history or biography ==Bibliography==