New Orleans' Favorite Biographer
Walter Isaacson was born in New Orleans in 1952 and grew up in Broadmoor, a middle-class neighborhood between Uptown and Mid-City that floods reliably and produces overachievers at an improbable rate. He attended Isidore Newman School — the private school on Jefferson Avenue that has produced more prominent New Orleanians per capita than any institution in the city — and from there went to Harvard, then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and then into journalism at Time magazine.
What followed was one of the most remarkable careers in American media and letters. Isaacson rose to become the editor of Time, then the CEO of CNN, then the president of the Aspen Institute. Along the way, he wrote biographies of the most consequential people of the modern era — books that sold millions of copies and defined how we understand the people who shaped our world.
The Biographies
Isaacson's subject list reads like a Mount Rushmore of human achievement: Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Henry Kissinger, and Elon Musk. Each biography became a definitive account — the book you read if you want to understand the person. The Steve Jobs biography, written with Jobs' cooperation before his death in 2011, was a global bestseller that revealed the Apple founder in all his genius and cruelty.
What makes Isaacson's biographies distinctive is their accessibility. He writes for general readers, not scholars. He tells stories. He finds the human being inside the historical figure. This is a very New Orleans approach to the past — less interested in abstract analysis than in the drama of actual people making actual decisions. Isaacson writes biography the way New Orleans tells stories: with character, color, and an understanding that the messiness of real life is more interesting than any clean narrative.
The New Orleans Guy
Despite decades in New York and Washington, Isaacson never stopped being a New Orleans guy. After Hurricane Katrina, he co-chaired the Louisiana Recovery Authority, working to rebuild the state's infrastructure and institutions. He served as chairman of the board of Teach for America and has been deeply involved in education reform efforts in New Orleans. He returned to teach at Tulane University, bringing his career full circle to the city where it began.
Isaacson has written about New Orleans with the same insight he brings to his famous subjects — understanding that the city's genius, like the genius of the people he profiles, is inseparable from its flaws. He is, in many ways, the ultimate New Orleans export: someone who went everywhere, met everyone, accomplished everything, and never stopped coming home.
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