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Jane Kramer

American journalist (born 1938)

Jane Kramer (born August 7, 1938) is an American journalist. She began her writing career at the Village Voice, moving to The New Yorker in 1964, where she remains a staff writer. Her books Allen Ginsberg in America (1969) and Honor to the Bride (1970), based on her travels in Morocco, were developed from long-form New Yorker articles.

Beginning in the 1970s, much of Kramer's reporting has been from various European locales, and since 1981 she has written a regular "Letter from Europe" for the New Yorker. Books based upon her European reporting include Europeans (1988) and The Politics of Memory (1996). Other books are The Last Cowboy (1977) and Lone Patriot (2003), the latter about a militia in the American West. Both books also explore downward mobility in America.

01Biography

Kramer was born in Providence, Rhode Island. She has an A.B. in English from Vassar College and an M.A. in English from Columbia University.

For the first paperback edition of The Last Cowboy, Kramer received a 1981 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Her other awards include an Emmy Award for documentary filmmaking, National Magazine Award, Front Page Award, and the fr:Prix européen de l'essai Charles Veillon.

Kramer is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a founding director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. She has taught at Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence, CUNY, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Since 2006, Kramer has been a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. In 2016, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Her cousin is the photographer Stephen Shore.

Watch videos about Jane KramerExplainers and documentaries on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Sources and credits

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