Amity R. Shlaes is an American author, writer, and columnist. Her latest book is Great Society: A New History and she is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression; The Forgotten Man: Graphic, a full-length illustrated version of the same book drawn by Paul Rivoche; Coolidge, a full-length biography of the thirtieth president; and The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americas Crazy and What to Do About It. National Review called the Forgotten Man the finest history of the Great Depression ever written. The Economist wrote of Coolidge that the book deserves to be widely read and made it an Editors Choice for 2013. The Forgotten Man: Graphic reached the #1 spot in its bestseller category.
She is a winner of the Hayek Prize and currently chairs the jury for the prize, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. She has twice been a finalist for the Loeb Prize in commentary. In 2002 she was co-winner of the Frederic Bastiat Prize, an international prize for writing on political economy, and later chaired the jury for that prize. In 2003, she was JP Morgan Fellow for finance and economy at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2004, she gave the Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, The Chicken versus the Eagle, which looked at the effect of the National Recovery Administration on entrepreneurs during the New Deal. Over the years she has served as Senior Fellow in Economic History at the Council on Foreign Relations and Director of The 4% Growth Project for the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
Ms. Shlaes is Chairman of the Board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation and Presidential Scholar at the Kings College in New York, and earlier taught at New York Universitys Stern School of Business. She has served as a columnist and member of the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal, and subsequently she was a columnist at the Financial Times and Bloomberg. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale College, she is married to fellow journalist and editor Seth Lipsky. The Lipskys have four children.