William Zinsser, master of Branford College in the 1970s and author of 18 nonfiction books in addition to On Writing Well, was one of America’s most influential teachers of writing–first in his seminars at Yale and then nationwide–as students from his Yale days happily recall.
Co-sponsored with Branford College, the Department of English, Francis Conversations with Writers and Editors, and the Traphagen Alumni Speakers Series, Yale College Office of Student Affairs.
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About Things I Learned from William Zinsser
Christopher Buckley
Christopher Buckley is a novelist, essayist, humorist, critic, magazine editor and memoirist. His books have been translated into sixteen foreign languages. He worked as a merchant seaman and White House speechwriter. He has written for many newspapers and magazines and has lectured in over 70 cities around the world. He was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor and the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence.
Mark Singer
Mark Singer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1974. He has contributed hundreds of Talk of the Town stories and scores of Profiles and reporting pieces. In the fall of 2000, he revived the U.S. Journal column in the magazine, a monthly feature that was written by Calvin Trillin from 1967 to 1982.
Singer’s account of the collapse of the Penn Square Bank of Oklahoma City appeared in The New Yorker in 1985 and was published as a book, “Funny Money,” that same year. In 1989, he published “Mr. Personality,” a collection of his reporting from The New Yorker. In 1996, Singer published “Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin,” which originated as an article in the magazine. His most recent books, “Somewhere in America,” (2004) and “Character Studies,” (2005), are collections of articles that originally appeared in The New Yorker.
Jane Mayer
Jane Mayer has been a New Yorker staff writer since 1995. She covers politics, culture, and national security for the magazine. Previously, she worked at the Wall Street Journal, where she covered the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, the Persian Gulf War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1984, she became the paper’s first female White House correspondent. She is the author of the 2008 Times best-seller “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals,” which is based on her New Yorker articles and was named one of the top ten works of journalism of the decade by N.Y.U.’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She is also the co-author, with Jill Abramson, of “Strange Justice,” and, with Doyle McManus, of “Landslide: The Unmaking of the President 1984-1988.” In 2009, Mayer was chosen as Princeton University’s Ferris Professor of Journalism. Her numerous honors include the John Chancellor Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the Goldsmith Book Prize; the Edward Weintal Prize; the Ridenhour Prize; the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism; the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, the Sidney Hillman Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the James Aronson Award for social justice journalism, the Toner Prize for political reporting, and, most recently, the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence.
John Tierney
John Tierney writes a column, Findings, for the Science Times section. He previously wrote the Big City column for the Times Magazine and the Metro section, the Political Points column for the Washington bureau, and an Op-Ed column.
He is the co-author, with the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, of the New York Times best-seller, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (Penguin Press, 2011). An excerpt, “Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue?”, ran in the Times Magazine. It was reviewed in the Times by Steven Pinker and named one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2011.
Mr. Tierney writes often about social sciences and about general controversies in science and medicine, such as the prosecution of doctors for prescribing pain medication. He has written columns on energy, like a $5,000 bet he placed on the price of oil, and aboutenvironmental issues, including a much-quoted critique of recycling.
Mr. Tierney is also the author of The Best-Case Scenario Handbook (Workman Publishing, 2002), and the co-author, with Christopher Buckley, of the comic novel, God Is My Broker: A Monk Tycoon Reveals the 7 ½ Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth (Random House, 1999).
Prior to joining the Times, Mr. Tierney was a contributing editor to Discover and Health magazines, a staff writer at Science 81-85 magazine, a reporter for the Washington Star and the Bergen Record, and a free-lance writer for many magazines. His reporting took him to six continents and won awards from American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Physics and the New York Publishers Association.