Jill Lepore Books in Order

If you want one big overview of the country: These Truths → This America → We the People
If you like early America and archival detective work: The Name of War → New York Burning → Book of Ages
If you want culture, feminism, and biography: The Secret History of Wonder Woman → Joe Gould's Teeth
If you're curious about media, data, and modern power: The Story of America → If Then → The Deadline

Jill Lepore grew up in West Boylston, Massachusetts, outside Worcester, in a family where reading and teaching were part of everyday life. Her father had a typewriter at home, which was unusual in her world, and she loved using it as a kid. She has said that the town library mattered just as much. Long before she had a plan for becoming a historian, she was already drawn to words, paper, and the idea that writing could keep something from being lost.

She wanted to be a writer before she knew what kind of writer she could be.

At Tufts University, Lepore started out as a math major and joined ROTC. Then writing pulled harder. She switched to English and finished her B.A. in 1987, later earning an M.A. in American Culture from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale, where she specialized in early American history. Between college and graduate school, she worked as a temp and secretary at Harvard, wrote constantly, and sat in on classes when she could.

Archives changed everything.

Much of Lepore's work begins with a stubborn question hiding in old papers. Her first major book, The Name of War, revisited King Philip's War and asked how memory shapes national identity after violence. Then New York Burning took up the 1741 fires and slave conspiracy trials in Manhattan, using a tightly focused episode to explore the larger knot of liberty and slavery in American life. Readers often come to her for the storytelling, but stay for the way she turns documents into arguments without making the prose feel heavy.

That same habit drives Book of Ages, her life of Jane Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's younger sister. By following letters and fragments left by a woman history almost passed over, Lepore opens up everyday eighteenth-century Boston and the limits of who gets remembered. She has a knack for finding the person at the edge of the frame and moving them to the center, not to make a point in the abstract, but to show how the record itself was built.

Her range is wider than early America.

In The Secret History of Wonder Woman, she connects a comic-book icon to feminism, family life, and the strange world around creator William Moulton Marston. In Joe Gould's Teeth, she follows the mystery of a missing manuscript through literary New York. In If Then, she digs into the Simulmatics Corporation and the Cold War roots of data mining, voter targeting, and prediction. However different these books look on the shelf, they return to some of the same interests: evidence, power, language, media, and the stories institutions tell about themselves.

Her broadest book so far is These Truths, a one-volume history of the United States. She followed it with This America, a shorter argument about nationalism and liberalism, and later We the People, a history of the Constitution centered on amendment and self-government. The Deadline gathers essays on politics, technology, culture, and grief, and shows how comfortable she is moving between the archive and the news cycle. She has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2005, and her audio work includes The Last Archive.

Today, Lepore teaches at Harvard, where she is the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History and, since 2024, a professor of law at Harvard Law School. What ties the whole body of work together is a simple but demanding curiosity. Who made the record? What got left out? And what happens to a democracy when it forgets how to argue with evidence?