Walter Isaacson Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Walter Isaacson is a published author, a professor, editor, journalist, and more.

Walter was born on May 20, 1952 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He would go to Isidore Newman School in New Orleans and served as student body president. He would attend the Telluride Association Summer Program at Deep Springs College. He would then major in history and literature at Harvard University, graduating in 1974. There he was the Signet Society president, belonged to Harvard Lampoon, and resided at Lowell House. He would then become a Rhodes scholar, attending the University of Oxford at Pembroke College. He graduated with first-class honors and studied PPE (philosophy, politics, and economics).

He started pursuing journalism and started out at London’s The Sunday Times before moving to work for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He would move on to Time Magazine in 1978, where he was the national editor, editor of new media, and a political correspondent. In 1996, he would be named the fourteenth editor of Time Magazine.

Walter has taught at Tulane as a professor of history and has worked for the D.C. nonpartisan policy studies organization Aspen Institute as its CEO. Isaacson chaired and was CEO of CNN beginning in July of 2001 and was there to guide the channel through 9/11. Shortly after this appointment in 2003, he would announce his decision to step down from the position of CNN president and would move to become the Aspen Institute’s president. He would be CEO and president of the Aspen Institute from 2003-2018, leaving for Tulane to be a history professor as well as a NYC advisory partner for Perella Weinberg Partners, a financial services firm.

The author has also founded the “Trailblazers” podcast about technology and its effects on business in partnership with Dell Technologies. He would be named a co-host on the PBS and CNN show “Amanpour & Company”.

Isaacson has authored several books on his own such as biographies about Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, and Kissinger. He co-wrote the book The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made with author Evan Thomas. His 2011 authorized biography on Jobs would be an international best-seller that broke biography sales records. The book won him the 2012 Gerald Loeb Award.

Isaacson served as a member of the Louisiana Recovery Authority as its vice chair, which worked on overseeing rebuilding following Hurricane Katrina. The author would be appointed in December 2007 to be chairman of the U.S.-Palestinian Partnership by President George W. Bush. He was also appointed vice-chair of Partners for a New Beginning by Hillary Clinton. He has been chair of a government board running Voice of America as well as a member of the Defense Innovation Board.

Isaacson has also been a co-chair of the United States and Vietnamese Dialogue regarding Agent Orange. He was appointed to the Advisory Committee for the NIH in 2008 and in 2009 Chairman to the Broadcasting Board of Governors until 2012. He was made co-chair of the New Orleans Tricentennial Commission in 2014. He also was appointed to the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance board in 2015. In 2016, Landrieu appointed him to be a member of the New Orleans City Planning Commission. He also belonged to the Defense Innovation Advisory Board and was appointed in 2018 by LaToya Cantrell, New Orleans mayor-elect, to be co-chair for a team focusing on her transition.

He has served as Teach for America’s chairman emeritus and belongs tot he boards for United Airlines, New Schools New Orleans, The New Orleans Advocate/Times-Picayune, Halliburton Labs, the Rockefeller Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Society of American Historians, and the Carnegie Institution for Science. He was president of the Society of American Historians in 2012. He has been a senior adviser and editor-at-large for Arcadia Published since 2019. He is also a Harvard Associate of History of Science and belongs to the Lowell House Senior Common Room. Pembroke College of Oxford has deemed him an Honorary Fellow. He is one of Time’s 100 most influential people of the world in 2012.

The author is also a Royal Society of the Arts fellow, earning its Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2013. He belongs to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the American Philosophical Society. He earned the humanities’ Jefferson Lecture from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2014. He has honorary degrees from a variety of colleges and universities, and Colorado Mountain College named their school of media and communications in his honor. Vanderbilt University awarded him The Nichols-Chancellor’s Medal in 2015.

His book Einstein: His Life and His Universe was adapted into a television series called “Genius”. His book Steve Jobs became the adapted movie “Jobs” in 2015 and his book Kissinger: A Biography would be adapted into the 1995 television movie “Kissinger and Nixon”.

Leonardo da Vinci is a 2017 book from Walter Isaacson. The book would spark a bidding war between Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures in August 2017 to get the rights. Paramount Pictures would buy the books rights through its Appian Way Productions company, owned by Leonardo DiCaprio. Appian Way Productions announced that it intended to make the film and have it star DiCaprio, with John Logan being brought on to write the script.

This book is a detailed look into the life of one of the world’s most celebrated human beings. The work itself is drawn from Leonardo’s notebook pages as well as various discoveries about his work and life. Da Vinci’s full genius is fleshed out in this interesting biography that brings the man to life.

Explore the curiosity of da Vinci, his imagination and his brilliance as he moved through science, technology, art, fantasy and more. Passionate and detailed, this is an up close look at the man who was so interested in everything from anatomy to art to weapons, inventions, and more. Pick up this book of the famed artist, scientist, inventor and see what his life and his interior world was really like!

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race is a 2021 book by author Walter Isaacson. This book is a fascinating biography of scientist Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for working on CRISPR, a gene-editing system that stands to revolutionize human health as we know it. The book hit #1 on the New York Times’ best seller list for nonfiction.

Learn about Jennifer Doudna and what sparked her interest in DNA. Determined to be a scientist from a young age, even if her counselor in high school advised her that girls did not ‘become’ scientists, Jennifer pursued her passion.

It would lead to one of the biggest scientific advances in the world since James Watson co-discovered DNA’s structure. Helping to develop CRISPR, Doudna has become of the greatest scientists in history and invented a tool that is easy to use and stands to transform the medical world as we know it while introducing some tough dialogues about morality and the moral implications of how it could be used.

Full of fascinating ideas, details, and information, this is the story of CRISPR’s development and one woman’s journey to push the boundaries of what is possible in science. Based on the real life scientific revolution and the story of Jennifer Doudna, pick up a copy of this incredible book to read all about it.