Doris Kearns Goodwin Biography

Quick Facts

NAME: Doris Kearns Goodwin
OCCUPATION: Educator, Journalist
BIRTH DATE: January 04, 1943 (Age: 70)
EDUCATION: Colby College, Harvard University
PLACE OF BIRTH: Brooklyn, New York
Maiden Name: Doris Helen Kearns
Full Name: Doris Helen Kearns Goodwin
AKA: Doris Kearns
AKA: Doris Goodwin
ZODIAC SIGN: Capricorn

Best Known For

Doris Kearns Goodwin is best known for authoring biographies of American presidents, including Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

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Doris Kearns Goodwin

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Doris Kearns Goodwin. The Biography Channel website. 2013. Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/doris-kearns-goodwin-38566. Accessed May 25, 2013.

In an interview with the Academy of Achievement in the mid-1990s, years before Team of Rivals was released, Goodwin expressed feeling apprehensive about the Lincoln project: "I was thinking that I wouldn't take on Lincoln until I was 70 or so, because it seems like the Moby Dick of historians, but the Civil War is so fabulously interesting, and so is he."

Several years after its publication,

Team of Rivals returned to the media forefront when director Steven Spielberg acquired rights to the book for a major film adaptation, Lincoln. The highly anticipated film, scheduled for a November 2012 release, stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln, Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln, and Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, among other prominent performers.

Asked why she's passionate about writing presidential biographies during her mid-'90s interview with the Academy of Achievement, Goodwin explained, "It is not a question of coming at it from the start as if I'm out to get them, or out to praise them. I just want them to come alive again. That's all you really ask of history. Then the reader can feel, with all the complexity of emotions, what it is that is happening to them."

Other Projects and Personal Life

In addition to writing, Goodwin has worked for NBC News, as a government professor at Harvard, and as a political commentator. Additionally, in 1994, she served as a consultant for a baseball documentary created by Ken Burns, The History of Baseball. She is currently working on her next book about the broken friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft.

Goodwin has been married to former White House adviser Richard Goodwin since 1975. They have three sons, Richard, Michael and Joseph.

BOOKS

Learn more about Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Get updates about new books, recommended reading and books by Doris Kearns Goodwin from Simon & Schuster.

Visit Doris Kearns Goodwin's official website.