Jared Diamond

About the author

Jared Diamond, born in Boston in 1937, is an American scientist, historian, and author whose sweeping interdisciplinary range — spanning biochemistry, anthropology, ecology, and evolutionary biology — made him one of the most widely read public intellectuals of his era. His landmark 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and cemented his reputation as a bold synthesizer of human history. A professor of geography at UCLA until his 2024 retirement, Diamond has received both a MacArthur Genius Grant and the National Medal of Science, though anthropologists have criticized his work for overemphasizing geography and climate.