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Thomas McNamee (Writer) new article content ... Thomas McNamee (born July 31, 1947) is an American writer. His published books in the field of natural history and conservation include The Grizzly Bear (1984), Nature First: Keeping Our Wild Places and Wild Creatures Wild (1987), The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone (1997), and The Killing of Wolf Number Ten (2014). He has published one novel, A Story of Deep Delight (1990), and two books in the field of culinary history, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution (2007), and The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance (Free Press, 2012).

McNamee’s essays, poems, and natural history writing have been published in Audubon, The New Yorker, Life, Natural History, High Country News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Saveur, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, Town & Country, and a number of literary journals. He wrote the documentary film Alexander Calder, which was broadcast on the PBS “American Masters” series in June 1998 and received both a George W. Peabody Award and an Emmy. Many of his book reviews have appeared The New York Times Book Review. In 2016 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a book in progress, The Inner Life of Cats.

Life and Career

Thomas McNamee (full name Charles Thomas McNamee III) was born on July 31, 1947, in Memphis, Tennessee, to mother Gladys Runyan McNamee (born Savanna, Ill.; 1920-1994) and father Charles Thomas McNamee Jr. (born Holly Springs, Miss.; 1913-2008). McNamee grew up mainly in Memphis, with an interlude of three years—ages three to seven—in New York City. At Yale he won the top prizes for both fiction and poetry and studied writing as a Scholar of the House under the tutelage of Robert Penn Warren. He graduated in 1969, magna cum laude.

In 1969 he joined Columbia Records in New York, and in 1971 produced the double album Music to Eat by the Hampton Grease Band, which was initially a flop but gradually gained fame and was reissued as a CD on its twenty-fifth anniversary. He also worked as an advertising copywriter at CBS Records from 1971 to 1976.