John A. Farrell
American biographer and historian
John A. Farrell is an American author and historian and a former newspaper reporter. He has written biographies of Richard Nixon, Ted Kennedy, Tip O'Neill and Clarence Darrow.
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American
About John A. Farrell
Farrell graduated from the University of Virginia in 1975 and then built a newspaper career, chiefly at The Denver Post and The Boston Globe. He served the Globe as White House correspondent and Washington editor, and he reported on every presidential campaign from 1976 to 2012. He also earned a doctorate in history at the Dutch university of Groningen. Farrell's biography Richard Nixon: The Life reached the final round for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 2018. The New-York Historical Society also named him American Historian Laureate and presented him with its $50,000 Zalaznick Book Prize in American History. In 2017 Farrell turned up notes by Nixon aide H. R. Haldeman. They showed that Nixon had personally approved disrupting Lyndon Johnson's efforts to negotiate peace in Vietnam before the 1968 election. Earlier, his life of Tip O'Neill won the Hardeman prize as the top book about Congress, and his life of Clarence Darrow won the 2012 Los Angeles Times award for best biography.