William T. Vollmann

Vollmann grew up partly in Indiana and California, the son of an academic, and has since reported from war zones, refugee camps, and the sex trade across the world in pursuit of firsthand material, funding some of his most dangerous research trips with journalism.

Europe Central (2005) interweaves dozens of German and Soviet lives (the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, the general Friedrich Paulus, spies, soldiers, and artists) across the twentieth century's two totalitarian machines, each vignette weighing the moral compromises ordinary talent makes under extremity; it won the National Book Award.

Vollmann has published prolifically across genres, from the seven-volume historical epic sequence Seven Dreams to journalism and photography on poverty and violence, and continues writing from Sacramento, California, at a pace few contemporaries match.