Biography

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James B. Stewart is the author of the national bestsellers Den of Thieves  (about Wall Street in the ‘80s), Blood Sport (about the Clinton White House), Blind Eye (an investigation of the medical profession) and Heart of a Soldier, which was named the “best book about 9/11” by TIME. The book recounts the life of a Vietnam war hero and head of security for Morgan Stanley who lost his own life on September 11th while saving 2,700 World Trade Center employees under his watch. Stewart’s New York Times bestseller, DisneyWar: The Battle for the Magic Kingdom, is a dramatic, behind-the-scenes account of the tumultuous tenure of Michael Eisner as Disney’s chief executive. It won the 2006 Loeb Award for Best Business Book and was named one of the best books of the year by Barron’s.

 

An Editor-at-Large of SmartMoney magazine and a contributing editor for SmartMoney.com, Stewart also is a reporter-at-large for The New Yorker. His weekly column, “Common Sense,” which also runs in The Wall Street Journal, features his insights into business and investing trends as well as what he’s buying and selling in his own portfolio. 

 

While at The Wall Street Journal, Stewart won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his reporting on the stock market crash and insider trading. At The Journal, he covered the Milken and Boesky scandals, the mergers and acquisitions boom of the 1980s, and the world of investment banking and the stock market. He became The Journal’s page one editor in 1988, overseeing coverage of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, the failed Soviet coup, and the presidential elections of both 1988 and 1992. Stewart also is the winner of the 1988 George Polk award and the 1987 and 1988 Gerald Loeb awards. Blind Eye was the winner of the 2000 Edgar Allen Poe Award given annually by the Mystery Writers of America.

 

Stewart’s other books include The Partners: Inside America’s Most Powerful Law Firms (1983), The Prosecutors: Inside the Offices of the Government’s Most Powerful Lawyers (1987), and Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction (1998). All of his books have been published by Simon & Schuster.

 

Stewart is a graduate of Harvard Law School and DePauw University. Prior to joining The Journal in 1983, he was Executive Editor of American Lawyer Magazine and was a lawyer with the firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York. He was born and attended public schools in Quincy, Illinois. Stewart lectures frequently on values and ethics in American business and politics. He is a member of the New York bar and holds the Bloomberg chair at the Columbia School of Journalism, where he is a professor. He lives in New York City and Shawangunk, N.Y.