Sir Harold Evans was the president and publisher of the Random House Trade Group (1990–1997) and the editorial director and vice chairman of U.S. News & World Report, the New York Daily News, the Atlantic Monthly, and Fast Company (1997–1999), all prior to the publication of his critically acclaimed bestseller The American Century.

On the heels of The American Century’s success, Evans resigned from executive life and began working full-time on two major writing and television projects. Little, Brown and Company acquired world rights to the two illustrated American history books and will publish the first one, called They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine Two Centuries of Innovators, in October 2004. They Made America is supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. A four-part television series based on the book and produced by WGBH for the PBS network with support from Olympus will air in November 2004.

Evans began his career in journalism as a weekly reporter at the age of sixteen. After service in the Royal Air Force (1946–1949), he graduated from Durham University in England with honors in Politics and Economics, and in 1956 was awarded a Harkness Fellowship for two years of travel and study in the United States at the University of Chicago and Stanford University. He wrote his master’s thesis on the reporting of foreign policy. He has since received honorary doctorates in law and literature from the Universities of Stirling, Durham, and Teesside, and the London Institute.

Following his studies, Evans worked in the 1950s at the Manchester Evening News, reporting on science and politics, then made an early reputation for investigative and campaigning journalism in the sixties as the editor in the north of England of the Northern Echo, one of the leading provincial daily newspapers. Prizes he won at the Northern Echo led to his appointment in 1967 as managing editor, then editor in chief of the Sunday Times (1967–1981), and editor of the Times (1981–1982). His account of these years, Good Times, Bad Times, was a number 1 bestseller in 1983. (His five-volume textbook, Editing and Design, became the standard training manual for journalists.)

Sir Harold Evans has received numerous awards, including the British Press Awards’ Gold Award for Lifetime Achievement, the highest accolade bestowed by the British Press. In 2003 in a British Journalism poll conducted by two publications, he was voted Britain’s greatest all-time newspaper editor, reflecting fifteen years of national newspaper awards: In 1973 he was named Editor of the Year, following the Sunday Times’s thalidomide campaign; he received the European Gold Medal of the Institute of Journalists for his successful appeal to the European Court of Human Rights against the government’s suppression of the thalidomide articles. Shortly before ending his year reviving the Times, Evans was named Editor of the Year by Granada Television’s What the Papers Say. In 1999 he was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Center of Photography.

Sir Harold Evans was honored with a knighthood for in 2004. He currently lives in New York City with his wife, Tina Brown, and their two children.