Garry Wills

Garry Wills is a cultural historian known and journalist known for his books on American politics and presidents as well as Catholicism and religious matters. He earned his BA St. Louis University, MA from Xavier University, and PhD from Yale University. His early books include Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970), Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1978), Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (1984), Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (1987), and Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992), which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Books Critics Circle Award.

More recently, Willis has written extensively on Christianity and matters of faith in works such as Why I Am a Catholic (2002), what Jesus Meant (2002), What Paul Meant (2006), What the Gospels Meant (2008), and What the Qur’an Meant and Why It Matters (2017). He has examined contemporary Catholicism in Why Priests?: A Failed Tradition (2013) and The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis (2015). Wills is professor of history emeritus at Northwestern University.