Carol Felsenthal biography

Carol Felsenthal specializes in writing biographies and magazine profiles. She has written six books, among them unauthorized biographies of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Katharine Graham, and S.I. Newhouse, Jr. First serial rights to her books have sold to Vanity Fair, Family Circle, and Woman’s Day. Excerpts from her books and articles have appeared in newspapers across the country and abroad. She is a Contributing Editor at Chicago magazine.

She is a regular blogger for The Huffington Post and for The Hill.

Her latest book is Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House, a close look at Bill Clinton’s post presidency. The paperback edition was published in June 2009 by HarperCollins.

HBO has signed to produce a television adaptation of her biography of Katharine Graham, Power, Privilege and the Post: The Katharine Graham Story. Joan Didion has written the revised screenplay.

In 2005 and 2006 she taught “Writing Profiles” at the University of Chicago—a course that drew on her experience writing magazine profiles of people ranging from Ann Landers to Don Rumsfeld to Michelle Obama. She has also given speeches around the country and abroad and appeared on scores of television and radio shows to talk about her experiences writing unauthorized biographies of some of the country's most powerful people. (Among them The Today Show, The Charlie Rose Show, McNeil/Lehrer Newshour, the BBC, All Things Considered, and she is a frequent guest on the
syndicated radio/television show Beyond the Beltway.)

Her most recent magazine profile is "Our Man in London," about Louis Susman, the ambassador to the Court of St. James's (UK) and appears in the February 2010 issue of Chicago magazine.

Other profile subjects include Michelle Obama (cover story February 2009), film critic Roger Ebert, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet, advice columnist Ann Landers, former commerce secretary and Gore campaign chairman William Daley, impeached Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The Ann Landers profile ran as the cover story of Chicago in February 2003, made news in publications worldwide, and several newspapers, including The New York Daily News, serialized it. [Felsenthal's profile of Irv Kupcinet won the 2004 Peter Lisagor Award for In-Depth Reporting awarded by the Society of Professional Journalists.]

She has been the featured speaker for many organizations around the country, and has addressed students at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois in Urbana, and Columbia University Law School in New York.

A native Chicagoan, Felsenthal was educated in the Chicago public schools, the University of Illinois at Urbana, where she received her B.A with High Honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and Boston College, where she received her M.A. She is married to Steven Felsenthal, an attorney. They have three children and live in Chicago.