Quick Facts
Biography
Margaret Talbot is an American essayist and non-fiction writer. She is also the daughter of the veteran Warner Bros. actor Lyle Talbot, whom she profiled in an October 2012 The New Yorker article and in her book The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century (Riverhead Books, 2012).
Life
She is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has also written for The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly. and was a regular panelist on the Slate podcast "The DoubleX Gabfest".
Her first book, The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father's Twentieth Century, was published in November 2012 by Riverhead.
She was formerly a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. and Executive Editor of The New Republic.
She lives in Washington, DC with her husband, journalist and author Arthur Allen (Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver; Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato) and their two children.
Her brothers are both journalists. Stephen Talbot is a long-time documentary producer for public television (Frontline, Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders) and David Talbot is the founder of Salon.com, the author of Brothers about Robert and John Kennedy, and Season of the Witch about San Francisco in the 1970s.
Her brother Stephen Talbot had a regular role on Leave It to Beaver as Beaver's best friend Gilbert Bates.
Awards
- 1999 Whiting Award