About the Author
Craig Fehrman is a journalist, historian, and New York Times bestselling author of This Vast Enterprise. He has written for the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and has been interviewed on PBS NewsHour and NPR.
This Vast Enterprise is a major revisionist history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, offering a fresh and more accurate account of one of the most important episodes in American history. Craig Fehrman spent five years visiting more than thirty archives, interviewing more than a hundred sources, and collecting oral history passed down over centuries. With each chapter moving to a different person’s point of view, including Thomas Jefferson, York (the Black man Clark enslaved), and Sacajawea, Craig Fehrman humanizes these influential figures and shatters long-held myths. He shows us that the captains are men who needed help on their expedition and this thrilling account reminds us that even the most familiar moments in history can still surprise us.
Craig Fehrman has published two other works of history, The Best Presidential Writing (edited by him), and Author in Chief (written by him). The Best Presidential Writing is a collection of essential speeches from the early years of our nation’s history to the present day. The collection encompasses notable favorites alongside lesser-known texts to reflect how words have shaped our nation. Author in Chief opens a window into the untold story of the books presidents wrote. Craig Fehrman explains these important works and casts a fresh light on the private drives and self-doubts that fueled our nation’s leaders.
Craig Fehrman grew up near Dillsboro, Indiana, and graduated from the University of Southern Indiana. He lives in Indiana with his wife and children.
Contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau to book Craig Fehrman for speaking events as a keynote speaker. Use the Request a Speaker form or email info@simonspeakers.com to speak to Craig Fehrman’s booking agent to request his speaking fee, booking information, and availability.
Raves and Reviews
Praise for This Vast Enterprise
This Vast Enterprise is a page-turner and a fantastic achievement. … Do we really need another book about the Lewis and Clark expedition? … After reading This Vast Enterprise, my answer is an emphatic yes. The author has done a huge amount of research, shifting the focus away from the familiar pairing of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and widening the lens. … Each chapter unfolds from the viewpoint of a different individual and the result is a richly woven tapestry of voices. … Through the perspectives of 10 people, Fehrman reframes this well-known story, revealing it as more complex, and profoundly human.”
—Andrea Wulf, The New York Times Book Review (front-cover review)
More than 220 years later, the Lewis and Clark expedition still intrigues. … In his immensely engaging book, This Vast Enterprise, Craig Fehrman strives to capture the motivations, values and ideas of the individuals who contributed to this multifaceted historical event. … Based on thorough research of published and unpublished sources, as well as Native American oral tradition, the book gives this well-known story a fresh breadth of implication.”
—The Wall Street Journal
An innovative new history of the expedition … History is usually written in the third person, even though it has to be lived in the first, and Fehrman takes advantage of the rich and deep documentation of the Lewis and Clark expedition to try to reconcile the discrepancy. … Fehrman doesn’t attempt to speak in the voices of his subjects. He merely focuses on what each individual experienced and knew, while keeping in mind how much they didn’t experience and didn’t know—an analytic technique that historians have always been free to borrow from novelists but often lose sight of in the scramble to accumulate data.”
—The New Yorker
An incredible feat, Craig Fehrman’s This Vast Enterprise is a wildly entertaining history of Lewis and Clark—the product of more than half a decade of rigorous and immensely impressive research—that never loses sight of the adventure at its center. Fehrman brings this legendary expedition thrillingly to life by turning our attention beyond Lewis and Clark themselves, revealing the oft-overlooked people and perspectives that made the journey possible. Expansive, compelling, and alive on every page, this is a perfect summer read for America’s 250th anniversary.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald, The TODAY Show, “Summer Beach Reads: The Buzziest Books of the Season”
I followed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s expedition to the Pacific in Craig Fehrman’s This Vast Enterprise. … I now feel as if I know how the Lewis and Clark team felt. … Lewis, Clark and several of the 30 men with them kept detailed journals, and Fehrman has drunk deeply from them as well as from recollections of the Native American leaders they encountered along the way. I felt like I was sharing the vistas, smells, discomforts, injuries, terrors (grizzly bears!) and occasional joys of an expedition now over 200 years back. … [Fehrman] scored a touchdown.”
—John McWhorter, New York Times Opinion
In his spectacular new book, every bit as audacious as the original expedition, Craig Fehrman rewrites our memory of the journey of Lewis and Clark, broadening the lens to show the many personalities—many long forgotten—who in 1804 made up the most daring American experiment yet. He paints an incredible, vivid, you-are-there portrait of an American nation being imagined and created for the first time and all those, from Thomas Jefferson to Native American chiefs, whose lives were forever altered by two of the most famous explorers in history.”
—Garrett M. Graff, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Devil Reached Toward the Sky
In This Vast Enterprise, Craig Fehrman has composed a magnificent hymn to a wildly colorful and largely unsung cast of fascinating, provocative characters without whom the epic of Lewis and Clark never would have been possible. A sweeping and revelatory story by a writer who is willing not only to acknowledge but also to embrace the complexities, nuances, and richness that have always resided beneath the surface of one of America’s most cherished national myths.”
—Kevin Fedarko, New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Park
Here, at long last, is the Lewis and Clark expedition presented in living technicolor. Employing an ever-shifting point of view that slyly and intriguingly builds upon itself, we see the great historic project as an epic of mutual discovery, in which the explorers and those whose lands are being explored are given equal consideration and dramatic weight. In this way, Fehrman leads us to confront the deeper truth that ‘discovery’ is never a one-way process—its fruits and its legacies, its gifts and its curses, flow in multiple directions.”
—Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of Blood and Thunder and The Wide Wide Sea
Praise for Author in Chief
One of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years. . . . Delightfully instructive.”
—Thomas Mallon, The Wall Street Journal
Joyfully engrossing … Juicy controversies and conversation-starters are the consistently found treats of Author in Chief, regardless of where you find yourself on the political spectrum. And the implication throughout—that books are vitally important to the nation’s soul—will surely appeal to red and blue state readers alike.”
—Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor
A breezy, anecdote-rich account of the memoirs and autobiographies that have helped candidates running for office … Most presidents’ books have aimed to entertain, and that might also be said of Author in Chief. But Fehrman has done his homework. His bibliographical essays are impressively thorough, particularly on works on the study of writing, publishing and reading. His readers will learn a lot.”
—The Washington Post
Credit to Craig Fehrman for the compendiousness, readability, and general exuberance of his Author in Chief.”
—James Parker, The Atlantic
CAUTION: This book contains material highly addictive to history lovers. From its account of Thomas Jefferson’s monumental efforts to bring out his Notes on the State of Virginia, to the description of John Kennedy’s fraudulent claims about writing Profiles in Courage, Craig Fehrman’s Author in Chief achieves what every original thesis should. The accumulated myths that we call our history are shattered by the recovery of the true facts. I’m annoyed right now that I didn’t write this disciplined, enormously engaging narrative myself.”
—Rinker Buck, author of The Oregon Trail
Author In Chief takes the reader into the hearts and minds of America’s presidents as they seek to define their legacies through literature. From Lincoln and Kennedy to Bush and Obama, Fehrman brings these men to life and allows us to see their struggles and revel in their successes. It offers an entirely new perspective into what it feels like to be president and how critical self-expression is to the study of American history.”
—Kate Andersen Brower, author of The Residence, First Women, and First in Line
