Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright is an American writer and journalist who is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine and a fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. Wright is best known as the author of the 2006 nonfiction book Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright is also known for his work with documentarian Alex Gibney who directed film versions of Wright's one-man show My Trip to Al-Qaeda and his book Going Clear. His 2020 novel, The End of October, a thriller about a pandemic, was released in April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic to generally positive reviews.

Wright graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas, Texas, in 1965 and was inducted into the school's Hall of Fame in 2009. He is a graduate of Tulane University and taught English at the American University in Cairo (from which he was awarded a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics in 1969) in Egypt for two years. Wright lives in Austin, Texas.

In 1980, Wright began working for the magazine Texas Monthly and contributed to Rolling Stone magazine. In late 1992, he joined the staff of The New Yorker. Wright is the author of six books but is best known for his 2006 publication, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. A quick bestseller, The Looming Tower was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and is frequently referred to by some media pundits as being an excellent source of background information on Al Qaeda and the September 11 attacks.

The book's title is a phrase from the Quran 4:78: "Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower," which Osama bin Laden quoted three times in a videotaped speech seen as directed to the 9/11 hijackers. In 2011, Wright wrote a profile of former Scientologist Paul Haggis for The New Yorker.

Starting with Haggis and eventually speaking with 200 current and former Scientologists, Wright's book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief was published in 2013. The book contains interviews with current and former Scientologists and examines the history and leadership of the organization. In an interview for The New York Times, Wright disclosed that he had received "innumerable" letters threatening legal action from lawyers representing the Church of Scientology and celebrities who were members of it.

The New York Times published Michael Kinsley's review of the book, where he wrote: "That crunching sound you hear is Lawrence Wright bending over backward to be fair to Scientology. Every deceptive comparison with Mormonism and other religions is given a respectful hearing. Every ludicrous bit of church dogma is served up deadpan. This makes the book's indictment that much more powerful."

In 2015, Alex Gibney produced a documentary based on Wright's book, titled Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. The film was nominated for seven Emmy Awards, winning three, and received a 2015 Peabody Award "for its detailed documentation of Scientology's history and abuses." Among Wright's other books is Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory (1994), about the Paul Ingram false memory case. On June 7, 1996, Wright testified at Ingram's pardon hearing.

Wright co-wrote the screenplay for the film The Siege (1998), which tells the story of a terrorist attack in New York City that leads to curtailed civil liberties and the rounding up of Arab-Americans. A script that Wright originally wrote for Oliver Stone was turned instead into a well-regarded Showtime movie, Noriega: God's Favorite (2000).

A documentary featuring Wright, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, premiered on HBO in September 2010. It was based on his travels and Middle East experiences during his research for The Looming Tower. My Trip to Al-Qaeda looks at al-Qaeda, Islamist extremism, anti-American sentiment, and the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq. It combines Wright's first-person narrative with documentary footage and photographs. Wright plays the keyboard in the Austin, Texas, blues collective WhoDo.

Wright is also a playwright. He has worked on a script over several years concerning the making of the epic film Cleopatra which starred Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and Rex Harrison. The play is titled Cleo and was to have opened in September 2017 in Houston, Texas, but was delayed by catastrophic flooding caused by hurricane Harvey. It eventually opened in April 2018.