George F. Kennan: An American Life.

George F. Kennan: An American Life (2011) is the magisterial authorized biography of one of the most consequential and intellectually formidable American diplomats of the twentieth century, written by John Lewis Gaddis, the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University and recipient of the 2005 National Humanities Medal, whose previous works including Strategies of Containment and The Cold War: A New History established him as the preeminent historian of the Cold War era. The product of nearly three decades of sustained collaboration, during which Gaddis conducted frequent interviews with Kennan and gained complete access to his voluminous personal diaries and papers, the book was by prior agreement withheld from publication until after Kennan's death in 2005 at the age of 101, with the journals' extraordinary frankness and candor lending the biography an intimacy that matched its century-long sweep. Kennan, best known for authoring the "Long Telegram" of 1946 and the "X Article" of 1947 that laid out the strategy of containment defining American policy toward the Soviet Union for four decades, was also an architect of the Marshall Plan, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, and one of the most searching and uncomfortable critics of American foreign policy and culture in the latter half of the twentieth century. The book won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the New York Historical Society American History Book Prize.