ABOUT

Lesley M. M. Blume is an award-winning journalist, historian, and New York Times bestselling author. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, WSJ Magazine, Vanity Fair, Columbia Journalism Review, Vogue, Town & Country, Air Mail, The Hollywood Reporter, Slate, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review Daily, among other publications. She often writes about historical nuclear events, historical war journalism, and the intersection of war and the arts.

She is currently working on her third major non-fiction book, A Devil’s Bargain, to be released in 2026. Click here to read a conversation between Blume and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik on the project.

Her last non-fiction book, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World, was released on August 4, 2020, to mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Fallout documents how American war correspondent John Hersey helped expose the deadliest government cover-up of the 20th century: the true effects of the nuclear bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This harrowing and engrossing story will remind readers about the ghastly realities of nuclear warfare, and of the essentialness of independent investigative journalism in holding the powerful to account. 

Reviewers called Fallout “magisterial” (The New York Times Book Review), “gripping and meticulously researched” (Washington Post), an “enthralling, fine-grained chronicle” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), and “journalism at its finest” (Bloomberg). The New York Times picked Fallout as an Editor’s Choice and one of the 100 notable books of 2020; Vanity Fair, Publishers Weekly and several other publications selected Fallout as one of the best books of 2020. The book is currently being adapted into a scripted series. Blume also reports widely on the 1945 Trinity test and the birth of the atomic age. Her work on Trinity Test downwinders for National Geographic was recently featured at congressional hearings on the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act and admitted into Congressional Record.

In 2016, Blume released Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises to commemorate the 90th anniversary of Sun‘s 1926 release.  Reviewers lauded Everybody Behaves Badly as “essential … a page-turner,” “magnificently reported,” “fiendishly readable,” “riveting,” and “the best book on Hemingway in Paris since A Moveable Feast.”  The book was a Washington Post notable book of 2016, an Amazon’s Editor’s Pick: Best Biographies and Memoirs, and became a New York Times best seller shortly after its publication. It has sold foreign editions around the world, including in Germany, Russia, and China.  Blume has also served as literary executor of the estate of editor, bookseller, and Lost Generation icon Sylvia Beach, founder and owner of Paris’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore and library, and original publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Among Blume’s early non-fiction books: It Happened Here (Thornwillow Press, 2011), book detailing the raucous cultural history of New York City’s St. Regis Hotel. The book was the inaugural volume of Thornwillow’s “Libretto series,” which showcases the work of literary lions past and present, including Peter Matthiessen, Adam Gopnik, and Lewis Lapham. Blume also wrote Let’s Bring Back (Chronicle Books, 2010), a cultural encyclopedia celebrating hundreds of forgotten objects, pastimes, fashions, and personalities from bygone eras. A call for a return to civility, it was deemed “whimsical … comical … [and] delightful” by The New Yorker. 

For the amusement of young readers, Blume has authored four critically-acclaimed novels and two collections of short stories, all published by Knopf. Her debut children’s novel, Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters, has sold over 300,000 copies.  Upon the release of her third children’s novel, Tennyson, reviewers compared her to writers Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Truman Capote (“Brilliant, unusual writing.”—The Chicago Tribune). In October 2023, Knopf released her fifth novel for young readers, Alice Atherton’s Grand Tour, which features real-life characters from the Lost Generation, including Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Sergei Diaghilev, among others.

The daughter of a classical pianist mother and a journalist father, Blume followed her father’s footsteps into the newsroom, beginning her career at The Jordan Times in Amman and Cronkite Productions in New York City. She later became an off-air reporter and researcher for ABC News Nightline with Ted Koppel in Washington, D.C., where she helped cover the historic presidential election in 2000, the 9/11 attacks, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Blume earned a B.A. in history from Williams College, and an M. Phil in Historical Studies from Cambridge University, where she was a Herchel Smith Fellow.  She wrote her graduate thesis on American press coverage of the 1991 Gulf War, and the historical evolution of the relationship between the American media and the U.S. military.

Born in New York City, she now lives in Los Angeles with her husband, also once a Nightline journalist. Their first date was a bio-chemical warfare training session just before the 2003 Iraq invasion.