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Biography
American

Hilton Als

1960

Hilton Als is an American critic and writer who has been a staff writer and theatre critic at The New Yorker since 1994. His books The Women (1996) and White Girls (2013) — hybrid works of criticism, memoir, and cultural history — are among the most formally inventive and intellectually ambitious works of American non-fiction of the past three decades. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2017.

Past sales0
PeriodContemporary
NationalityAmerican
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Hilton Als (b. 1960) was born in Brooklyn, New York, to an immigrant family from Barbados. He joined The New Yorker in 1994 and became its lead theatre critic.

Life and Career

The Women (1996) — a book in three sections about his mother, a woman who calls herself the Negress, and Dorothy Dean, a figure in the Warhol circle — is one of the most original works of American non-fiction of the 1990s. It defies categorisation: part memoir, part cultural criticism, part fiction, entirely its own genre.

White Girls (2013) — essays about figures including Eminem, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Pryor, and André Leon Talley — is a meditation on whiteness, Blackness, and the complicated identifications that cross racial and gender lines. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Als won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2017 for his theatre criticism in The New Yorker.

Major Works and Themes

Als writes about race, gender, performance, identity, and the way cultural figures become screens for collective desires and anxieties.

Key Works

  • The Women (1996)
  • White Girls (2013) — National Book Critics Circle Award

Collecting Als

The Women first edition (FSG, 1996) brings $30–$60. White Girls (McSweeney’s, 2013) brings $20–$40.