Wyn Wachhorst

Wyn Wachhorst’s Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth (MIT Press) was a History Book Club selection, picked by Choice as an outstanding book of the year, and reviewed favorably in Newsweek, Discover, Smithsonian, Science, the New York Times, London Sunday Times, and some three dozen other publications.  MIT submitted it for the Pulitzer and five other prizes, more than they had sought for any previous book.  The Dream of Spaceflight: Essays on the Near Edge of Infinity (Basic Books) was on the science bestseller lists of Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  The Best of Times: Motifs from Postwar America, Reflections on Nostalgia (2016), is a collection of nineteen essays and memoirs.  His 55 articles and essays have appeared in the Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Southwest Review, San Francisco magazine, Narrative magazine, Endless Vacation, Mechanical Engineering, Isis, Extrapolation, and in anthologies.  Three were noted in Best American Essays and one recently won the McGinnis-Ritchie Prize for best essay of the year.  Forthcoming in the Yale Review is “The Case for Wonder.”  Wachhorst writes speeches and articles for Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin and was asked by NASA’s Decade Planning Team to write the “new NASA myth,” an inspirational long-term mission statement. He was editor for Richard Elkus’ Winner Take All: How Competitiveness Shapes the Fate of Nations (Basic Books), and for A Place in the Sun (Stanford University Press), the memoirs of former Stanford University President Donald Kennedy.  He is currently writing a biography of Dr. Camran Nezhat, who revolutionized modern medicine by developing the technology that enabled robotic surgery.  Wachhorst received his Ph.D. in American history from Stanford and taught history and American studies at Stanford, the University of California Santa Cruz, and San Jose State.