Daniel Okrent is the prize-winning author of six books. Before The Guarded Gate, he published Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (2011), which was cited by the American Historical Association as the year’s best book on American history. Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history. Among his many jobs in publishing, he was corporate editor-at-large at Time Inc., and was the first public editor of the New York Times. 

Okrent served on the board of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery for 12 years, including a four-year term (2003-2007) as chairman, and remains a board member of the Skyscraper Museum and the Authors Guild. A native of Detroit and a graduate of the University of Michigan, he now lives half the year in New York and the other half on Cape Cod with his wife, poet Rebecca Okrent; they have two grown children.