Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson is an American writer and journalist, born in New Orleans in 1952. He joined Time in 1978 and became its editor in 1996, then chaired CNN from 2001 to 2003 and led the Aspen Institute from 2003 to 2018; he has taught history at Tulane University since 2018. He writes biographies of people he treats as case studies in creativity: “Kissinger” (1992), “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” (2003), “Einstein: His Life and Universe” (2007), “Steve Jobs” (2011), “Leonardo da Vinci” (2017), “The Code Breaker” (2021), on the biochemist Jennifer Doudna, and “Elon Musk” (2023). “The Innovators” (2014) traces the history of computing as a collective enterprise.