Lois Leveen

Lois Leveen holds degrees in history and literature from Harvard, the University of Southern California, and UCLA. She is the author of the novels Juliet’s Nurse and The Secrets of Mary Bowser. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Chicago Tribune, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and on NPR.

The Vanishing Black Woman Spy Reappears

What a newly discovered letter from “Mary Bowser,” a slave turned Civil War spy, reveals about race in postbellum America....

LOIS LEVEEN

NONFICTION

HISTORY

The Hidden Dying of Doctors: What the Humanities Can Teach Medicine, and Why We All Need Medicine to Learn It

There is an equally heartbreaking loss of another young doctor in Paul Kalanithi’s book, one especially troubling because it received almost no commentary....

LOIS LEVEEN

EDUCATION

NONFICTION

MEMOIR & ESSAY

The Paradox of Pluck: How Did Historical Fiction Become the New Feminist History?

Poster from Diary of a Lost Girl (G.W. Pabst, 1929) ONCE UPON A TIME, women's lives might have been fodder for fairy tales, but they weren't considered the stuff of serious scholarship. That changed when affirmative action made higher ...

LOIS LEVEEN