Yardley, Jonathan.

Jonathan Yardley, Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, columnist, and author, was born 27 October 1939 in Pittsburgh, Pa., to William Woolsey Yardley and Helen Ingersoll Gregory Yardley. The bulk of his childhood was spent in Chatham, Va., where his father was the headmaster of Chatham Hall, a girls' boarding school. In 1957, Yardley graduated from the Groton School in Groton, Mass., and went on to attend the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C., from which he graduated with a degree in English in 1961. While at UNC, Yardley edited the school newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel . Upon graduation, Yardley became an intern at the New York Times, where he was an assistant to James Reston.

In 1964, Yardley began his newspaper career as an editorial writer and book reviewer at the Greensboro, N.C., News and Record, where he stayed for the next ten years. From 1968 to 1969, Yardley was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. From 1974 to 1978, he was the book editor at the Miami Herald, and, from 1978 to 1981, he held the position of book critic at the Washington Star, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 1981. When the Star folded in 1981, Yardley became book critic and columnist at the Washington Post .

Yardley was the author of several books, including a Ring (1977), a biography of Ring Lardner; Our Kind of People (1989), a family memoir about the lives of his parents; Out of Step: Notes from a Purple Decade (1991), a collection of his columns from the Washington Post ; States of Mind: A Personal Journey Through the Mid-Atlantic (1993); Misfit, a biography of Fred Exley; and Monday Morning Quarterback (1998). His book reviews and articles appeared in the New Republic, Sports Illustrated, Forbes, Esquire, Saturday Review, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications.

From the guide to the Jonathan Yardley Papers, 1792-2006, (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. Southern Historical Collection.)