AUTHOR BIO | CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR JOHN CREWDSON’S PREVIOUS BOOKS
JOHN CREWDSON
has been a journalist for nearly 40 years, most recently as a Senior Correspondent for the Chicago Tribune based in Washington D.C. He has written extensively about science and medicine in addition to the Gulf War, misrepresentations by Save the Children and other child sponsorship organizations, and CIA malfeasance in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 hijackings.
Crewdson’s 1996 Tribune Special Report, “Code Blue: Survival in the Sky,” about the inadequacy of medical equipment aboard the nation’s commercial airliners, was one of three finalists for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. It also led to adoption by every major American airline of portable defibrillators and modern emergency medical equipment.
As a national correspondent for the New York Times, Crewdson’s coverage of immigration in America was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Crewdson also holds the Sigma Delta Chi Gold Medal, the Peter Lisagor Award, the American Bar Association's Gavel Award, and numerous other journalism honors. His 50,000 word history of the discovery of the AIDS virus, published in the Chicago Tribune in 1989, received that year’s George Polk Award for Medical Reporting and the 1990 Science Journalism Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Crewdson began his career as a correspondent for The New York Times in Berkeley, where he graduated from the University of California in 1970 magna cum laude with an A.B. in Economics. After an internship at the Times’s Washington Bureau and graduate study at Oxford University, Crewdson became a staff reporter in The Times’s Washington Bureau, where he covered the Watergate scandal from inception to conclusion and the subsequent CIA and FBI intelligence scandals.
After five years as a Times national correspondent based in Houston, where he won the Pulitzer Prize, Crewdson moved to the Chicago Tribune as national news editor and then metropolitan news editor. He later served as chief of that newspaper’s Los Angeles and San Francisco Bureaus. In 1990 Crewdson joined the Tribune’s Washington Bureau, where his reporting has included a 1994 expose of a scandal in breast cancer research that led to the strengthening of government scrutiny over clinical trials. Crewdson lives with his family in Bethesda, Maryland. Science Fictions is his third book.