Journalist, author, and lifelong chronicler of American power, crime, and myth — from Wall Street boardrooms to the Texas frontier.
Biography
Bryan Burrough was born August 13, 1961, in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Temple, Texas. He earned a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Missouri in 1983 and went straight to work as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covering Dallas, Houston, Pittsburgh, and New York over nine years — work that earned him three Gerald Loeb Awards for distinguished financial journalism.
In 1992 he joined Vanity Fair as a special correspondent, a post he held for twenty-five years, producing investigative features on subjects ranging from Sumner Redstone and Larry Ellison to the Costa Concordia disaster and the Weather Underground. His writing has also appeared as book reviews and op-eds in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, and he's discussed his work on Today, Good Morning America, and in numerous documentary films. He is now Editor at Large at Texas Monthly, where he hosts the true-crime podcast Stephenville and continues to write.
Across eight books, Burrough has moved between three registers that define his work: Wall Street and corporate crime, true crime and radical history, and Texas history and mythmaking. What unites them is a reporter's instinct — digging up buried stories and separating myth from fact.
“One hell of a good read.”— The New York Times, on The Gunfighters
“Hard to imagine a more careful, complete, and entrancing book on the subject.”— The Washington Post, on Public Enemies
“Frightening, informative, and silkily readable.”— The New Yorker, on Dragonfly
Recognition