| Birth Name: | Joan Doran |
| Birth Place: | Baltimore, Maryland |
| Nationality: | American |
| Occupation: | Charles A. Dana Professor of History, Emerita |
| Spouse: | Travis Hedrick |
| Awards: | Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography |
| Alma Mater: | Brown University |
| Thesis Title: | The True American : Henry Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, "Prufrock", and Others |
| Thesis Year: | 1974 |
Joan Doran Hedrick (born May 1, 1944) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Jack London.[1]
Hedrick was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Paul Thomas Doran and Jane Connorton Doran.[2]
She earned an A.B. degree from Vassar College in 1966, and a Ph.D. from Brown University in 1974. Her Ph.D. dissertation at Brown was titled "The True American: Henry Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, 'Prufrock', and Others".[3] She taught at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut from 1972 through 1980 and in 1980 began teaching at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
In 1982, Hedrick's first book, Solitary Comrade: Jack London and His Work, was published by the University of North Carolina Press. Her book Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life was published in 1994 by Oxford University Press and won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.[4] The book received favorable reviews from The New York Times[5] and Publishers Weekly.[6]