Jonathan Yardley

Jonathan Yardley was the book critic at The Washington Post from 1981 to December 2014 and held the same post from 1978 to 1981 at the Washington Star. In 1981, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Yardley was born on October 27, 1939, in Pittsburgh and spent his childhood in Chatham, Virginia. Yardley graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There, he was a member of St. Anthony Hall and the student newspaper's editor, The Daily Tar Heel, in 1961.

After leaving Chapel Hill, Yardley interned at the New York Times as assistant to James Reston, the columnist and Washington Bureau chief. Then, from 1964 to 1974, Yardley worked as an editorial writer and book reviewer at the Greensboro Daily News; during this time, he was also a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, the academic year 1968-1969, where he studied American literature and literary biography.

From 1974 to 1978, Yardley served as book editor of the Miami Herald. From 1978 to 1981, he was the book critic at the Washington Star, receiving a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 1981. In 1981, Yardley became a book critic and columnist at the Washington Post.

Yardley is the author of several books, among them biographies of Frederick Exley and Ring Lardner. His memoir about his family, Our Kind of People, describes his parents' 50-year marriage and casts a wry eye on the American WASP experience. He edited H.L. Mencken's posthumous literary and journalistic memoir, My Life as Author and Editor. He has written introductions to books by Graham Greene, A. J. Liebling, Booth Tarkington, and others.

Yardley is known simultaneously as a scathingly frank critic and a Starmaker. Among the talents he has brought to public light and championed are Michael Chabon, Edward P. Jones, Anne Tyler, William Boyd, Olga Grushin, and John Berendt. On the other hand, he wrote a famously scathing review of Joe McGinniss' book The Last Brother: The Rise and Fall of Teddy Kennedy, saying, "Not merely is it a textbook example of shoddy journalistic and publishing ethics; it is also a genuinely, unrelievedly rotten book, one without a single redeeming virtue, an embarrassment that should bring nothing except shame to everyone associated with it."

In February 2003, Yardley began a series called "Second Reading," described as “An occasional series in which The Post’s book critic reconsiders notable and neglected books from the past.” Every month or so, for the next seven years, he published essays about notable books from the past, many of which had gone out of print or were in some way seen as worth reading again. In this series, he gained attention for his highly critical look at The Catcher in the Rye in 2004. Europa Editions published a collection of the Second Reading columns in July 2011.

On December 5, 2014, Yardley announced his retirement as the Post's book critic. Yardley was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In addition, Yardley has been a Nieman Fellow. George Washington University awarded Yardley an honorary doctorate of letters.