Michael Lesy (born 1945) is an American non-fiction writer.[1] His books, which combine historical photographs with original writing, include Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties (1976), Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life (1982), Visible Light (1985), Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties (2007), Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century (with Lisa Stoffer, 2013), Looking Backward: A Photographic Portrait of the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (2017), and Snapshots 1971–77 (September 2021).[2]
Lesy grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio.[3] He received a B.A. in theoretical sociology from Columbia University, an M.A. in American social history from the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. in American cultural history from Rutgers University.[4] He taught at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, from 1990 to 2020, and is a Hampshire emeritus professor of literary journalism.
Wisconsin Death Trip, Lesy's first book, was adapted into a film by James Marsh in 1999.[5] [6] Ironically, Lesy explained in a 2003 interview, "I wanted to make it a movie. But it cost too much to produce. So it was just a poor man’s way of making a movie in book form." Wisconsin Death Trip was presented on the BBC documentary series Arena in 2000.[7]
In 2006 the United States Artists Foundation named Lesy its first Simon Fellow.[8] In 2013 Lesy was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Photography Studies.[9]
| Year | Title | Publisher | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1973 | Wisconsin Death Trip | Pantheon Books | |
| 1976 | Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties | Pantheon Books | |
| 1980 | Time Frames: The Meaning of Family Pictures | Pantheon Books | |
| 1982 | Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life | Pantheon Books | |
| 1985 | Visible Light | Crown Publishing Group | |
| 1987 | The Forbidden Zone | Farrar, Straus, and Giroux | |
| 1991 | Rescues: The Lives of Heroes | Farrar, Straus, and Giroux | |
| 1997 | Dreamland: America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century | The New Press | |
| 2002 | Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943 | W. W. Norton & Company | |
| 2005 | Angel's World: The New York Photographs of Angelo Rizzuto | W. W. Norton & Company | |
| 2007 | Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties | W. W. Norton & Company | |
| 2013 | Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century (with Lisa Stoffer) | W. W. Norton & Company | |
| 2017 | Looking Backward: A Photographic Portrait of the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century | W. W. Norton & Company | |
| 2021 | Snapshots 1971–77 (September 17 scheduled publication) | Blast Books |