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LAWRENCE WRIGHT
Many journalists felt a new sense of professional relevance after the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks, none more so than Lawrence Wright. Wright lived in Cairo from 1969 to 1971, speaks some
Arabic, and has spent much of his career writing about the vicissitudes of religious faith. Watching the
attacks on television, Wright hoped that it wasn’t a Middle East terrorist strike. “I was nagged by the
likelihood that a culture I was very fond of had declared war on a culture that I was a part of,” he
says. Wright is currently working on a book that many believe will be the most comprehensive
account of the events leading up to that day. “I felt I was born to write this book.”
Wright’s advantage over others covering the story lies in his familiarity with Arabic culture and
language, but also in his sensitivity to the role of belief in everyday life. “Spiritual matters are far
more influential in people’s lives than, for instance, politics, the mainstay of the journalist’s craft,” he
writes in the preface to Saints & Sinners (1993). For Wright, religion isn’t an oddity or irrational
sentiment, but a subterranean force that informs and pervades all our actions. He likens religion to a
subway system: “Aboveground, people go about their business, perhaps unaware of the intricate
commotion going on in the world below their feet.” Extending the metaphor, one might conceive of
Wright’s journalistic terrain as a map of the system, charting the twists, turns, and intersections of the
various lines (“the Jewish line, the Catholic, the Muslim, to name a few of the multiple possibilities”)
running beneath our ostensibly secular world.
Lawrence George Wright was born in Oklahoma City on August 2, 1947. He was raised in Dallas,
Texas, where his father was the chairman of Lakewood Bank & Trust. Once a week, Wright’s mother,
a voracious reader, would escort her three sons to the public library to select books to read. All three
grew up to be writers.
At Tulane University, Wright got to know Walker Percy, the writer whose novels (The Moviegoer,
Love Among the Ruins ) are extended meditations on philosophy and religious belief. “He
demystified the writing thing for me,” he says. Wright was graduated in 1969 and nearly enlisted in
the Marines before applying for conscientious-objector status. Instead of going to Vietnam, Wright
spent the next year in Cairo, teaching English and studying Arabic. Life was difficult for an American
in Egypt during that period, but Wright and his wife made many Egyptian friends and developed
lifelong passions for the region.
Wright’s first job in journalism was as a reporter for the Race Relations Reporter in Nashville,
Tennessee, in 1971. In 1972, he worked for Southern Voices, a publication of the Southern Regional
Council in Atlanta, Georgia, and began freelancing for national magazines.
His first book, City Children, Country Summer (1979), chronicled a summer with the Fresh Air
Fund, an organization that sends inner-city children to live with farm families. In 1980, Wright’s work