Paul Hendrickson is an American author and journalist. His eighth book, Fighting the Night, was published on May 7, 2024. It is an account of his father flying Black Widow night fighters on Iwo Jima in the last part of World War II. The book will come out on the twenty-first anniversary of his father's death.
He is the author of the 2011 New York Times best seller and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost. For the 2004 book Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43, Hendrickson wrote the introduction and accompanying text. In 2003, he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy. His 1996 work about Vietnam, The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War, was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, Hendrickson was a staff feature writer at the Washington Post from 1977 to 2001.
Hendrickson was born in California but grew up in the Midwest and in a Catholic seminary in the Deep South, where he studied for seven years for the missionary priesthood. This became the subject of his first book, published in 1983: Seminary: A Search. He is also the author of Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott, a finalist for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award.
In 2009, Hendrickson was a joint visiting professor of documentary practice at Duke University and of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Hendrickson has degrees in English from St. Louis University and Pennsylvania State University. He has two grown sons and lives with his wife, Cecilia, outside Philadelphia.
