Biography
Professional Bio
Born in New Jersey and educated at Rutgers and Binghamton, with post-doctoral fellowships at Berkeley and Brown, Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts and Letters and Professor of History Emeritus at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the author or editor of eleven books: Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the "Forgotten Man" (North Carolina, 1983; 25th anniversary edition, 2008); The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (Times Books/Random House, 1984, 1993; 25th anniversary edition, 2009); The End of the Conservative Era: Liberalism After Reagan (Arbor House, 1987); Mario Cuomo: A Biography (Scribner, 1988); What's Left?: A New Democratic Vision for America (Adams, 1996); The Great Depression: A History in Documents, (Oxford University Press, 2000); Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History (McGraw-Hill, 2001, paper, 2002), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (CQ Press, 2002), the two-volume Encyclopedia of the Great Depression (Macmillan Reference, 2004, editor-in-chief), Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America (Crown, 2008), and The Times They Were a-Changin'—1964: The Year "the Sixties" Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn (Arcade, 2022). His first two books on the Depression era have become classics in the field, acclaimed by historians and general readers alike. The Great Depression has been called "the best one-volume overview of the Great Depression." Two of his books have been named among the "Notable Books of the Year" by the New York Times Book Review, and three have been listed among the Editor's Choice "Bear in Mind" books in that publication. Both of those books remain in print and continue to sell more than four decades after their original publication.
In 2010, McElvaine won the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence. In 2017 he was presented with the B.L.C. Wailes Award for national distinction in the field of history. His articles and opinion pieces appear frequently in such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times Book Review, Salon, Newsweek, The Nation, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Politico, Washington Monthly, and Lincoln Square. Well over 100 of his articles have been published in major national publications.
He writes his Musings & Amusings on Substack and is a contruting writer for Lincoln Square. One of his articles there,"The Men Working to Transform the United States into Gilead,"which presents a few of the points that will be made in An Agreed-Upon Fiction, was voted the #1 piece of the year 2025 by Lincoln Square readers.
Professor McElvaine has served as historical consultant for several television programs, including the seven-episode PBS series The Great Depression. He has received many awards for his teaching, including a silver medal in the national Professor of the Year program of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Personal Bio
He has been married to Anne Lee McElvaine for nearly six decades. They have four children: Kerri, Lauren, Allison, and Brett. Bob and Anne currently reside in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Among his interests beyond writing and teaching are progressive politics, travel (he regularly leads trips to destinations around the world), feminism, music, sports, and photography. He has been in 50 countries and every continent except Antartica.
Anne and Bob McElvaine at Po Monkey's in the Mississippi Delta, 2010.