Laurence Leamer - Biography

Biography

Leamer was born in Chicago and later moved to upstate New York with his family where he attended Vestal Central High School. He attended Antioch College where he spent a year in France, studied at the Université de Besançon, and worked in a factory. He received his B.A. in History from Antioch in 1964. After his graduation, Leamer joined the Peace Corps and was stationed in the mountains of Nepal. When he returned home, Leamer studied both at the University of Oregon and the prestigious Columbia University School of Journalism, where he graduated second in his class in 1969 while being named a Pulitzer International Fellow.

After finishing at Columbia, Leamer worked as an associate editor at Newsweek before turning to writing magazine articles for a range of publications, including Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and Playboy. During this period, Leamer worked in a coal mine in West Virginia, while researching an article. During the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, he was the only journalist to live in a Bengali hotel in Dacca and travel to remote areas of the newborn Bangladesh. His article in Harper's won a citation from the Overseas Press Club for "Best Magazine Reporting".