Lawrence Wright, Author at Texas Monthly

@lawrence_wright RSS

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for the New Yorker. He has also written for Rolling Stone and Southern Voices, a publication of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta. His history of Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf, 2006), spent eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and was translated into 25 languages. The book was nominated for the National Book Award and won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Wright’s one-man play, My Trip to al-Qaeda, was made into a documentary film and aired on HBO. Wright’s seventh book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief (Knopf 2013), is based on a profile he wrote of the writer-director Paul Haggis in the New Yorker that won the National Magazine Award in 2012.

Essay: Remembrance of Things Primitive

Feb 1, 1993 — By Lawrence Wright

The Case for Castration

Apr 30, 1992 — By Lawrence Wright

Critics call it brutal and barbaric, but it may be the most effective treatment for sex offenders.

Are Men Necessary?

Feb 1, 1992 — By Lawrence Wright

To hear some women tell it, nature created two genders, one nearly perfect and the other badly flawed. I wonder whether they’re right.

Dec 1, 1990 — By Lawrence Wright

A Christmas story for all you kids out there.

The Price of Peace

Feb 1, 1990 — By Lawrence Wright

With the cold war fading into history, Fort Worth’s General Dynamics now has to regard peace as not merely an ideal but an economic reality.

A Fool and His Money

Dec 1, 1989 — By Lawrence Wright

Why we are so soon parted.

Hotter’n Hell

Nov 1, 1989 — By Lawrence Wright

Cycling a hundred miles is a hard enough way to spend a Saturday. It’s even harder in Wichita Falls in August.

Jan 1, 1989 — By Lawrence Wright

How Madalyn Murray O’Hair became the supreme being of the American atheist movement.

Feb 1, 1988 — By Lawrence Wright

Why did my daughter’s favorite stuffed animal seem strangely familiar?

Texas Primer: The Cotton Bowl

Jan 1, 1988 — By Lawrence Wright

The ghosts of bowl games past recall an era when cotton and the Cotton Bowl were king in Texas.