David Grann

David Grann is an American staff writer at The New Yorker who crafts meticulous, propulsive narrative nonfiction — including Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager — with the precision of a novelist.

David Grann has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003 and is among the finest narrative nonfiction writers working today. His books draw from deep archival research and in-person reporting to reconstruct events that read — without distortion — with the momentum of literary thrillers. Killers of the Flower Moon, published in 2017, tells the story of the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma, whose members were being systematically murdered for their oil wealth. It is an extraordinary piece of historical reconstruction — meticulous in its research, devastating in its implications, and the starting point for one of the foundational investigations of the early FBI. Martin Scorsese’s 2023 adaptation brought the story to an even wider audience.

The Lost City of Z follows Grann’s research into the disappearance of British explorer Percy Fawcett in the Amazon in 1925 and becomes as much about Grann himself — and the peculiar compulsion that drives people to follow obsessions into dangerous territory — as about Fawcett. The Wager, published in 2023, reconstructs a catastrophic eighteenth-century shipwreck and the conflicting accounts of survival that followed, and is a meditation on truth, narrative, and the power of official stories over actual events.

Grann’s weakness, if he has one, is that his narratives occasionally build expectations his resolutions cannot fully satisfy — the truth, after all, is messier than fiction. But his ability to find the right story, master its material, and convey its stakes to readers who knew nothing about the subject before picking up the book puts him in a small class of American narrative nonfiction writers.