A Civil Action

Jonathan Harr (born September 13, 1948) is an American nonfiction writer best known for his national bestseller A Civil Action (1995), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was adapted into a film starring John Travolta, and The Lost Painting (2005), named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times. Born in Beloit, Wisconsin, to a U.S. diplomat father, he has contributed to The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, taught nonfiction writing at Smith College, and served as writer-in-residence at the University of Chicago.