Nicholas Dawidoff

Who is Nicholas Dawidoff?

Nicholas Dawidoff is an American writer.

Dawidoff was born in New York City, and grew up in New Haven, Connecticut with his mother and sister.

His father’s struggles with mental illness left him without a prominent male figure from an early age – a painful subject he explores in a celebrated article for The New Yorker called My Father’s Troubles, June 12, 2000. A full text reprint is available here.

He graduated from the Hopkins School and attended Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude in 1985 with a degree in history and literature. He moved back to New York to pursue a career as a writer and began working at Sports Illustrated, where he became a staff writer covering baseball and the environment.

In 1989, he was selected as a Henry Luce Scholar and spent a year in Bangkok, Thailand, writing for the Bangkok Post and teaching American Studies at Chulalongkorn University. In 1991 he resigned from Sports Illustrated and began writing books. He continues to write articles, on a variety of topics, for periodicals like The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic and The New York Times Magazine, where he is now a contributing writer.