ABOUT

Lesley M. M. Blume is an award-winning journalist, historian, and New York Times bestselling author. She has reported for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, WSJ Magazine, Vanity Fair, National Geographic, Columbia Journalism Review, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Slate, Vogue, Town & Country, Air Mail, and The Hollywood Reporter, among other publications. Throughout the course of her career, she has interviewed and profiled scores of luminaries from different fields, including political leaders, nuclear experts, filmmakers, designers, artists (and more than one con artist). She often writes about historical nuclear events, historical conflict journalism, and the intersection of war and the arts.

She is currently working on her third major non-fiction book, A Devil’s Bargain (2026), which documents media- and book coverage of the Manson murder saga. 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 (2020), documented how American war correspondent John Hersey helped expose the deadliest U.S. government cover-up of the 20th century: the true radioactive effects of the nuclear bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This harrowing and engrossing story serves as a reminder about the horrific 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, one of the 100 Notable Books of 2020, and one of the best books released this century. Vanity Fair, Publishers Weekly and several other publications also cited Fallout as one of the best books of 2020. The book is currently being adapted into a scripted series.

Blume has also reported extensively on the 1945 Trinity nuclear 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. Critics lauded Everybody Behaves Badly as “fiendishly readable…a deeply, almost obsessively researched biography of a book” (Washington Post), “an essential page-turner” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), “magnificently reported” (Gay Talese), and “riveting” (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review). 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.  Blume has also served as literary executor of the estate of 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.

For the amusement of young readers, Blume has authored five 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).

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.

Though a longtime New Yorker, she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their family. She met her husband at Nightline; their first date was a bio-chemical warfare training session just before the 2003 Iraq invasion.