Discover the Best Books Written by Robert Kanigel

Robert Kanigel (born May 28, 1946) is an American biographer and science writer known as the author of seven books and more than 400 articles, essays, and reviews. Born in Brooklyn, Kanigel graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City and received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

After college, he held three engineering jobs before becoming a freelance writer in 1970. Over the next 30 years, Kanigel lived and wrote in Baltimore, Maryland, and San Francisco, California. His articles appeared in magazines including the Johns Hopkins Magazine, Baltimore Sun, The New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Wilson Quarterly, Change, American Health, Psychology Today, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Science 85, The Sciences, Mosaic, Longevity, National Observer, and Human Behavior.

His first book, Apprentice to Genius: The Making of a Scientific Dynasty, was published in 1986. This was followed by The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan in 1991; The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency in 1999; High Season: How One French Riviera Town Has Seduced Travelers for Two Thousand Years in 2002; and Faux Real: Genuine Leather and 200 Years of Inspired Fakes in 2007. Vintage Reading: From Plato to Bradbury, a Personal Tour of Some of the World's Best Books, published in 1998, is a compilation of 80 book reviews.

In 1999, Kanigel became a professor of science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he helped start its Graduate Program in Science Writing, which he directed for seven years. In 2011, he returned to live and write in Baltimore. He is currently working on a biography of Jane Jacobs.

On An Irish Island is an ensemble biography of the scholars, linguists, and writers who visited Ireland's Blasket Islands during the early twentieth century. While researching one of the book's subjects, George Derwent Thomson, Kanigel came across the ideas of Milman Parry, the "Darwin of Homeric Studies." Kanigel followed his interest and wrote a biography released in 2021, Hearing Homer's Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry.