PERSON: Doris Kearns Goodwin

Historian

Doris Helen Kearns Goodwin (born January 4, 1943) is an American biographer, historian, former sports journalist, and political commentator. She has written biographies of numerous U.S. presidents. Goodwin’s book No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995. Goodwin produced the American television miniseries Washington. She was also executive producer of “Abraham Lincoln,” a 2022 docudrama on the History Channel. This latter series was based on Goodwin’s Leadership in Turbulent Times.

Doris Helen Kearns was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Helen Witt (née Miller) and Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns. She has two sisters, Charlotte Kearns and Jeanne Kearns. She was raised Catholic. Her paternal grandparents were Irish immigrants. She grew up in Rockville Centre, New York, where she graduated from South Side High School. Her formative years in Rockville Centre are the subject of her 1997 memoir Wait Till Next Year. She attended Colby College in Maine, where she was a member of Delta Delta Delta and Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated magna cum laude in 1964 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. She was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1964 to pursue doctoral studies. In 1968, she earned a PhD in government from Harvard University, with a thesis titled “Prayer and Reapportionment: An Analysis of the Relationship between the Congress and the Court.”

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