Cullen Murphy

Who is Cullen Murphy?

John Cullen Murphy, Jr. is an American writer and editor probably best known for his work at The Atlantic, where he served as managing editor.

He was born in New Rochelle, New York, in 1952, a son of illustrator and cartoonist John Cullen Murphy. He grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was educated at Amherst College, from which he graduated with honors in medieval history in 1974. Murphy's first magazine job was in the paste-up department of Change, a magazine devoted to higher education.

He became an editor of The Wilson Quarterly in 1977. From the mid 1970s until 2004 he worked with his father, John Cullen Murphy, as writer for the comic strip Prince Valiant, for which his father produced the artwork. He is also the author of The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own; Are We Rome?, which compares the politics and culture of Ancient Rome with that of the contemporary United States; and God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern Word.

He currently serves as editor at large for Vanity Fair and lives in Massachusetts. He is on the advisory board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College. He has three children: Jack, Anna, and Tim.