Discover the Best Books Written by Tom Shroder

Tom Shroder is an award-winning journalist, editor, and author. His most recent book, "The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived: A True Story of My Family," is an investigation into the life of his grandfather, Pulitzer Prize-winning author MacKinlay Kantor. Book critic Susan Cheever said, "In writing a history that is also a meditation on writing, Shroder has created a book that is as useful as it is fascinating." 

Shroder is also the author of "Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal," selected as a Washington Post notable book of 2014. His earlier book, the best-selling "Old Souls," is a classic study of the intersection between mysticism and science. Shroder is also co-author, with former oil rig captain John Konrad, of "Fire on the Horizon, the Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster." 

Sebastian Junger, author of "War" and "The Perfect Storm," says of Fire on the Horizon, "It's one of the best disaster books I've ever read.. . I tore through it like a novel, but with the queasy knowledge that the whole damn thing is true. A phenomenal feat of journalism." As editor of The Washington Post Magazine, he conceived and edited two Pulitzer Prize-winning feature stories. 

His most recent editing project, "Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time," by Brigid Schulte, was a New York Times bestseller. In addition to being an author and editor of narrative journalism, Shroder is one of the foremost editors of humor in the country. He has edited humor columns by Dave Barry, Gene Weingarten, and Tony Kornheiser, as well as conceived and launched the internationally syndicated comic strip Cul de Sac by Richard Thompson. 

With humorist Barry and novelists Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard, he concocted and edited "Naked Came the Manatee," a satirical serial novel. Shroder was born in New York City in 1954, the son of a novelist and a builder and the grandson of MacKinlay Kantor, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his civil war novel "Andersonville." Shroder attended the University of Florida, where he became Editor of the 22,000 circulation student daily newspaper despite the fact that he was an anthropology major (an affront for which the university's journalism faculty was slow to forgive him). 

After graduation in 1976, he wrote national award-winning features for the Fort Myers News-Press, the Tallahassee Democrat, The Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Miami Herald. At the Herald, he became editor of Tropic magazine, which earned two Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure. Shroder is also known for his creation, along with Barry and Weingarten, of the Tropic Hunt, which has become the Herald Hunt in Miami and the Post Hunt in Washington, a mass-participation puzzle attended by thousands each year.