Tom Reiss

Tom Reiss is an American historian, journalist and biographer based in New York City. His nonfiction often recovers people obscured by war, revolution or contested identity. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Reiss writes narrative history with the instincts of an investigator. The Orientalist follows the elusive Lev Nussimbaum, a Jewish-born writer who fashioned himself as a Muslim prince and wrote under several names. Führer-Ex, created with former German neo-Nazi Ingo Hasselbach, examines political extremism from inside the movement. Across these books, Reiss returns to reinvention, historical erasure and the pressure of public upheaval on individual lives.

The Black Count tells the story of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the mixed-race French Revolutionary general and father of novelist Alexandre Dumas. Reiss connects the general’s military triumphs, imprisonment and betrayal to episodes later transformed in The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. The book won both the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 2013 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.

Start with The Black Count. It offers the clearest meeting point between Reiss’s archival detective work and his gift for forward-moving narrative, while restoring the remarkable life behind some of nineteenth-century fiction’s most famous adventures.