Pulitzer Prize winner will headline Nebraska Governor’s Lecture in the Humanities

Presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin will deliver the 25th Governor's Lecture in the Humanities this fall.

Taylor Gage, spokesman for Gov. Pete Ricketts' office, announced Goodwin's appearance Wednesday morning on Twitter as a "Big get!"  The lecture, slated Sept. 22 at the Lied Center for Performing Arts in Lincoln, is a project of the Nebraska Humanities and the E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues with sponsorship, in part, by the Duncan Family Trust.

Goodwin has spent five decades studying American presidents. Her lecture, according to Nebraska Humanities, will draw from her New York Times bestseller, "Leadership in Turbulent Times," published in September 2018. 

Goodwin’s career was inspired when as a 24-year-old graduate student at Harvard University she was selected to join the White House Fellows, a prestigious program for leadership and public service. Goodwin worked with President Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House and later assisted him in the writing of his memoirs.

She then wrote "Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream" — a national bestseller re-released in spring 2019. Goodwin followed with the Pulitzer Prize-winning "No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II," among other bestselling titles.

Her accolades include the Charles Frankel Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal, the New England Book Award and the Carl Sandburg Literary Award.