John Jeremiah Sullivan


John Jeremiah Sullivan is an American writer, editor and teacher based in Wilmington, North Carolina. He is a contributing writer for The [New York Times Magazine], a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, and the southern editor of The Paris Review. In 2014, he edited that year's The Best American Essays, a collection in which his work has been featured in previous years. He has also served on the faculty of Columbia University, Sewanee: The University of the South, and other institutions. He is the co-founder of the non-profit research initiative Third Person Project.

Early life and education

Sullivan was born in Louisville, Kentucky to Mike Sullivan, a sportswriter. His mother is an English professor. He earned his degree in 1997 from The University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Career

Sullivan's first book, Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son, was published in 2004. It is part personal reminiscence, part elegy for his father, and part investigation into the history and culture of the thoroughbred racehorse.
His second book, Pulphead, is an anthology of fourteen previously published magazine articles, with most of them "in substantially different form" for the book.
Sullivan's essay "Mister Lytle", originally published in The Paris Review, won a number of awards, including a National Magazine Award, and was anthologized in Pulphead. Sullivan recounts how he lived with Andrew Nelson Lytle, when Lytle was in his 90s, helping him with house chores and learning some wisdom about writing and life.
His original music appears on the self-titled album Life of Saturdays.
In 2017, he helped lead a small group of 8th-grade students on a scavenger hunt to resurrect lost copies of The Daily Record, the African-American newspaper at the center of a white supremacist coup d'état and massacre that occurred in his adopted home town of Wilmington, NC, in 1898. He and his team located seven total copies, all of which are digitized and available for view via the N.C. Digital Heritage Project.
In 2019, the New Yorker published Sullivan's novella, "Mother Nut," on its website.
After being featured multiple times in the past and even editing an installment of The Best American Essays in 2014, Sullivan's essay "Corona" was featured in the 2025 essay collection edited by Jia Tolentino.
Sullivan is married to Dr. Mariana Johnson, a film scholar and professor. They have two daughters.

Reception

In a 2025 interview American journalist Wright Thompson stated that his favorite piece of journalistic writing is Sullivan's "The Final Comeback of Axl Rose".

Books

Pulphead: Essays, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011.

Essays and reporting

;GQ
;The New Yorker
  • on the history of the essay, 2014.
  • 2014
  • a novella, 2019.
;Harper's Magazine
;New York Magazine
;The New York Times Magazine
;The Paris Review
  • ”, interview, 2002
  • , an essay, 2010.
  • , on American cave art, 2011.
  • , 2012
  • , 2021
  • , 2021
The Oxford American
  • , 2010
  • “, 2013
  • , 2016
  • , 2017
The Yale Review
  • , 2022
The Sewanee Review
  • , 2024
Sullivan has also written an introduction to a new edition of The Great Shark Hunt, an essay collection by Hunter S. Thompson.

Awards