Jonathan Alter is an award-winning author, reporter, columnist and television analyst. He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers, a columnist for The Daily Beast and an analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He spent 28 years at Newsweek, where he was a senior editor and columnist and wrote more than 50 cover stories. From 2011 to 2013, Alter wrote a column for Bloomberg View, and has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The Atlantic,Vanity Fair,The New Republic, and other publications. Most recently, he authored The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies (2013). His 2010 book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One, went to #4 on the New York Times Nonfiction Bestseller List and was one of the Times' “Notable Books” of the year and The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, published in 2006, was also a bestseller. Alter was a Fellow of the Japan Society in Tokyo (1993), the Ferris Visiting Professor of Press and Politics at Princeton University (1997), and the Rhodes Visiting Professor at Arizona State University(2009). Alter is also an executive producer of Alpha House, a satirical television show produced by Amazon Studios.
A Chicago native, Alter received his B.A. in history with honors from Harvard in 1979. Alter is also the author of Between the Lines: A View Inside American Politics, Media and Culture (a collection of 20 years of his Newsweek columns), and the coeditor of Inside the System (a collection of Washington Monthlyarticles). He is chairman of the board of the Lukas Prize Project, which provides cash awards for non-fiction authors, and serves on the board of Donors Choose, the Bone Marrow Foundation, the Blue Card, the Montclair Library Foundation and the Historians Advisory Council of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial. He is married to Emily Lazar. They live in New Jersey with their children, Charlotte, Tommy, and Molly.