Stephen Budiansky is the author of seventeen books about military history, intelligence and espionage, science, the natural world, and other subjects. His most recent books are Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union; and Mad Music: Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel.
His writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times magazine and op-ed pages, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Economist, and many other publications.
Stephen Budiansky grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and graduated from Lexington High School. He received a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from Yale University in 1978 and a master of science degree in applied mathematics from Harvard the following year. From 1979 to 1982 he was a magazine editor and radio producer at the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C.; from 1982 to 1985 he was Washington correspondent and then Washington editor of the scientific journal Nature. In 1985–86 he was a Congressional Fellow at the U.S. Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment, where he co-authored a study of advanced conventional weapons technology. In 1986 he joined the staff of U.S. News & World Report where he worked for the next twelve years in a variety of writing and editing positions, including national security correspondent, foreign editor, and deputy editor.
He is a member of the editorial board of Cryptologia, the scholarly journal of cryptology and intelligence history, and is on the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel.
In 2011, Budiansky was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship as a writer of general non-fiction to complete his biography of the quirky and brilliant American composer Charles Ives.
He lives on a small farm in Loudoun County, Virginia.
Earlier Books
• Mad Music: Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel (2014). University Press of New England/ForeEdge.
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•Blackett’s War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare (2013). Knopf.
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•Perilous Fight: America's Intrepid War with Britain on the High Seas, 1812–1815 (2011). Knopf.
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•Murder, By the Book (2008). Black Sheep Press.
• The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War (2007). Viking.
• Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage (2005). Viking.
• Air Power: The Men, Machines, and Ideas That Revolutionized War, from Kitty Hawk to Iraq (2004). Viking.
• The Character of Cats (2002). Viking.
• The Truth About Dogs (2000). Viking.
• The World According to Horses: How They Run, See, and Think (2000). Henry Holt.
• Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (2000). Free Press.
• If A Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness (1998). Free Press.
• The Nature of Horses (1997). Free Press.
• Nature's Keepers (1995). Free Press.
• The Covenant of the Wild (1992). Yale University Press (reprint, 1999).
