Early Life and Career
Noah is the son of Marian Jane (née Swentor) and Robert M. Noah, a television producer. He grew up in New Rochelle, NY, and Beverly Hills, CA. His father is Jewish and his mother is Protestant, and he describes himself as an atheist. He is a graduate of Harvard College, from which he obtained a degree in English in 1980, and where he was on the prose board of the Harvard Advocate. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Noah was an assistant managing editor at U.S. News and World Report, a Washington reporter for the Wall Street Journal, a staff writer at The New Republic and a congressional correspondent for Newsweek. Prior to rejoining the New Republic after a 29-year hiatus, Noah was for 12 years a senior writer at Slate.
In April 2012 Noah published a book, The Great Divergence, about income inequality in the United States, the subject of a ten-part series that he published in Slate in September 2010. The series won the 2011 Hillman Prize in the magazine category. Writing on Page One of the New York Times Book Review, the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman called the book "as fair and comprehensive a summary as we are likely to get of what economists have learned about our growing inequality." The book also won praise from Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker, Andrew Hacker in the New York Review of Books, and William Julius Wilson in the Nation.
On March 22, 2013, Noah announced over Twitter that he'd been fired by The New Republic. He didn't give an indication as to why.
Read more about this topic: Timothy Noah
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