Egan (born November 8, 1954) is an American author, journalist and op-ed columnist for The New York Times, writing from a liberal perspective.Egan has written seven books.
His first, The Good Rain, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award in 1991.
For The Worst Hard Time, a 2006 book about people who lived through the Great Depression's Dust Bowl, he won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Washington State Book Award in History/Biography.
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America (2009) is about the Great Fire of 1910, which burned about three million acres (12,000 km²) and helped shape the United States Forest Service.
The book describes some of the political issues facing Theodore Roosevelt.
For this work he won a second Washington State Book Award in History/Biography and a second Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award.In 2001, The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series to which Egan contributed, "How Race is Lived in America".Egan lives in Seattle.
He is a weekly op-ed writer for The New York Times.