William C. Taubman is currently the Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science at Amherst College.
The son of a New York Times journalist who learned the importance of working hard and thinking carefully as well as to accept challenges, but not possible ones.
In this episode we learn how Professor Taubman entered Harvard at only the age of 16. In his early career it was unclear if he might pursue journalism instead of academia. Even after he entered academia he almost ended up leaving the halls of learning for the CIA.
As an academic, he considered how he could combine his interest in not only teaching but in research and writing. He worked long and hard to find a way to write scholarship that would be accessible to general readers.
His biography of Nikita Khrushchev won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2004 and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography in 2003.
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