About

I grew up in Pennsylvania and Washington State and went to college in Portland, Oregon. I worked for three years in scholarly book publishing and then went to graduate school. I received my PhD in American studies from Yale in 2007.

My first book, The Mark Inside, began when I discovered Frank Norfleet’s too-good-to-be-true story of going undercover into the Big Con. It struck me as the perfect tale on which to hang a history of American economic development as driven by fraud and speculation. I started the book as soon as I left academia, at the exact moment that the con game of subprime housing threatened to crash the economy. The Mark Inside was published by Knopf in March 2012 and the Vintage paperback in 2013.

My overriding interest is using story and creative narrative form to convey argument and analysis. I am in interested in stories from 19th and 20th century American history that revise our conventional understanding of literature, markets, and women's participation in both.

That's not true. My overriding interest is reading, and I write because I read.

And that's why I wrote a biography of Katharine Sergeant White, the first fiction editor of The New Yorker, because what is an editor but someone who puts her reading into action? Katharine was happiest when she was reading with a pencil in her hand and her singular gift was her immense receptivity to her authors. I recognized her as soon as I met her on the page and savored spending six years reading her letters. I wish she could have been my editor. I wish I could have had her job.

I live in upstate New York in a 175-year-old farmhouse with my family and a beautiful, deranged dog named Lyra. My name is an aptonym.