Garry Wills (born May 22, 1934) is an American author, journalist, and historian, specializing in American history, politics, and religion, especially the history of the Catholic Church. He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1993.

Wills has written nearly forty books and, since 1973, has been a frequent reviewer for The New York Review of Books.^[1] He became a faculty member of the history department at Northwestern University in 1980, where he is currently an Emeritus Professor of History.

Wills was born on May 22, 1934, in Atlanta, Georgia.^[2] His father, Jack Wills, was from a Protestant background, and his mother was from an Irish Catholic family.^[3] He was reared as Catholic and grew up in Michigan and Wisconsin, graduating in 1951 from Campion High School, a Jesuit institution in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. He entered and then left the Society of Jesus.

Wills earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Saint Louis University in 1957 and a Master of Arts degree from Xavier University in 1958, both in philosophy. William F. Buckley Jr. hired him as a drama critic for National Review magazine at the age of 23. He received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in classics from Yale University in 1961.^[4] He taught history at Johns Hopkins University from 1962 to 1980.

Additional Reading

Religion Should Make Us Pluralistic, But Often the Converse is True, At Least in Trump’s Land

Two Hundred Verses about Compassionate Living in the Quran