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Joshua Prager
Award-Winning Journalist & Author of The Family Roe
Joshua Prager
Award-Winning Journalist & Author of The Family Roe
Biography
For more than twenty years, Joshua Prager, a former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal, has written about historical secrets—revealing all from the hidden scheme that led to baseball’s most famous moment (Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World”) to the only-ever anonymous recipient of a Pulitzer Prize (a photographer he tracked down in Iran). His work, described by George Will as “exemplary journalistic sleuthing,” has shed new light on our cultural touchstones. So does his new book, The Family Roe, illuminating unknown stories and people behind Roe v. Wade, and enabling the public, for the first time, to see the abortion debate in America in its full social and personal context. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has been embraced by people on both sides of the abortion issue. Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal that it was “stupendous, a masterwork of reporting,” while The New York Times Book Review called it “an honest glimpse into the American soul."
Joshua’s first book, The Echoing Green, was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. The New York Times Book Review called it “a revelation and a page turner, a group character study unequaled in baseball writing since Roger Kahn’s Boys of Summer some three decades ago.”
His second book, 100 YEARS, a collaboration with Milton Glaser, the legendary graphic designer who created the I♥NY logo, is a list of literary quotations on every age from birth to one hundred. Wrote the New York Times Book Review: “As the pages pass, there is an increasingly wistful sense of what time takes from us.”
Joshua has spoken at venues including TED and Google. He was a Nieman fellow at Harvard and a Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Hebrew University. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two daughters.
Speaker Videos
In Search for the Man Who Broke My Neck
Joshua Prager, author of "The Family Roe," on finding "Jane Roe's" daughters
The Family Roe
Speech Topics
Secrecy
For 25 years, Prager's work as a journalist has centered on historical secrets. Among much else, he has uncovered the hidden scheme that led to baseball’s most famous moment, The Shot Heard Round the World, the only anonymous recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, a photographer he found in Iran, and the “Roe baby” – the unknown woman whose unwanted conception led to Roe v. Wade. His stories have helped the public to reassess cultural touchstones. They have also helped individuals unburden themselves of what they have not spoken before, and with every story, Prager has observed the corrosive effects of secrecy which he can speak to in great detail.
Journalism
“There's always more to it,” Don DeLillo observed in his novel Libra. “This is what history consists of. It is the sum total of the things they aren't telling us.”
Prager has made a career of uncovering those untold things, of revealing historical secrets -- from the only anonymous recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, a photographer he found in Iran, to the unknown “Roe baby,” the woman whose unwanted conception led to Roe v. Wade. His stories have revealed the hidden truths missing from our national narratives, and he can tell how they came to be, how, over and again, he uncovered missing documents and drew out from subjects the truths they never spoke before.
Roe
Thirty years ago, the legal scholar Laurence Tribe wrote that the only way for America to move beyond the “clash of absolutes” inherent in Roe v. Wade was by “giving voice to the human reality on each side of the ‘versus.’” So I did in The Family Roe -- telling the story of Roe not through politics but people, and writing about them, the pro-life and pro-choice alike, with empathy. The result, in the words of the New York Times, was “an honest glimpse into the American soul.” The book, meantime, not only humanized abortion in America but corrected the historical record. A finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize, the book has been embraced by people on both sides of the issue, and helped the American public to understand exactly how, a half-century after the Roe ruling, it came to be overturned.
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