William Finnegan

William Finnegan is an award-winning American writer and journalist. Considered one of the world’s finest nonfiction authors, Finnegan has been widely acclaimed for his incisive writing and his thoughtful exploration of complex topics such as race, culture and class. He is best known for his memoir, Barbarian Days: a Surfing Life, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for autobiography.

Finnegan was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1952. From an early age, he was intrigued by writing and began publishing his first pieces as a high school student. After graduating from Harvard, he began working as a journalist for the Washington Post, a position he held for five years. Following this, he wrote for various other publications, including Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Throughout his career as a journalist, Finnegan has reported from some of the most volatile zones in the world, including China, Afghanistan, Africa and the Middle East.

Finnegan’s work has explored a range of issues related to race, culture and class. Some of his most famous works include A Dream of White Horses (1985), which explored race and class in the early 1980s, and Crossing the Line (1994), an exploration of the line between poverty and prosperity. A Dream of White Horses was well received and subsequently republished in book form. Crossing the Line, meanwhile, earned Finnegan a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

Finnegan’s masterpiece is undoubtedly Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (2015). This acclaimed memoir chronicles Finnegan’s lifelong involvement with surfing and his various adventures in remote regions in which he sought for the perfect wave. Barbarian Days also touches on Finnegan’s own struggles as a writer and his feelings of alienation from the world around him. The work was immensely successful, both critically and commercially, and saw Finnegan win the Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography in 2016.

Since Barbarian Days was published, Finnegan has published two other works—The Catch (2019) and Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves (2020). The Catch is a collection of essays exploring Finnegan’s lifelong love of fly-fishing, while Deep looks at the strange and fascinating dive methods and world of freediving.

In summary, William Finnegan is an American writer and journalist, whose works have explored race, culture and class. He is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, and for his subsequent works, The Catch and Deep. Finnegan has proven himself to be one of the most perceptive and thought-provoking authors of our time and his work continues to inspire readers from all over the world.