Michael Monroe Lewis (born October 15, 1960) is an American non-fiction author and financial journalist. His bestselling books include The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, Panic, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood and Boomerang. He has been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009.
Lewis was born in New Orleans to corporate lawyer J. Thomas Lewis and community activist Diana Monroe Lewis. He attended the college preparatory Isidore Newman School in New Orleans. He attended Princeton University where he received a BA degree (cum laude) in Art History in…
Michael Monroe Lewis (born October 15, 1960) is an American non-fiction author and financial journalist. His bestselling books include The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, Panic, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood and Boomerang. He has been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009.
Lewis was born in New Orleans to corporate lawyer J. Thomas Lewis and community activist Diana Monroe Lewis. He attended the college preparatory Isidore Newman School in New Orleans. He attended Princeton University where he received a BA degree (cum laude) in Art History in 1982 and was a member of the Ivy Club.
He went on to work with New York art dealer Daniel Wildenstein. He enrolled in the London School of Economics, and received his MA degree in Economics in 1985. Lewis was hired by Salomon Brothers and moved to New York for their training program. He worked at their London office as a bond salesman. He resigned to write Liar's Poker and become a financial journalist.
Lewis described his experiences at Salomon and the evolution of the mortgage-backed bond in Liar's Poker (1989). In The New New Thing (1999), he investigated the then-booming Silicon Valley and discussed obsession with innovation. Four years later, Lewis wrote Moneyball, in which he investigated the success of Billy Beane and the Oakland A's. In August 2007, he wrote an article about catastrophe bonds entitled "In Nature's Casino" that appeared in The New York Times Magazine.
Lewis has worked for The Spectator, The New York Times Magazine, as a columnist for Bloomberg, as a senior editor and campaign correspondent to The New Republic, and a visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote the Dad Again column for Slate. Lewis worked for Conde Nast Portfolio but in February 2009 left to join Vanity Fair, where he became a contributing editor.
In an interview at the 2010 National Book Awards, Tom Wolfe called Lewis one of two "writers to watch" (the other was Mark Bowden).
In September 2011, after the successful release of the film adaptation of his book Moneyball, it was reported that Lewis planned to take on "a much more active role in the what could be the next film based on one of his books", and would start writing a script for a Liar's Poker film.
A best-selling author, Lewis has been widely praised by critics. In a review for Moneyball, Dan Ackman of Forbes said that Lewis had a special talent: "He can walk into an area already mined by hundreds of writers and find gems there all along but somehow missed by his predecessors."A New York Times piece said that "no one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Mr. Lewis", praising his ability to use his subject's stories to show the problems with the systems around them.
Before marrying former MTV reporter Tabitha Soren on October 4, 1997, Lewis was married to Diane de Cordova Lewis and former CNBC correspondent Kate Bohner. He and Soren have two daughters and one son. They reside in Berkeley, California.