Gene Lyons
Gene Lyons is an American political columnist who has defended former U.S. President Bill Clinton. Writing. He and Joe Conason co-authored "The Hunting of the President: The 10 Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton", a documentary book published in 2000, with a supporting film. The book outlines a purported right-wing campaign waged against President of the United States Bill Clinton leading eventually to the president's impeachment because he lied under oath about having extramarital sexual relations with a White House intern. It extends the discussion in Lyons' 1996 book "Fools for Scandal: How  the Media Invented Whitewater". A winner of the 1980 National Magazine Award for Public Service for the "Texas Monthly" article “Why Teachers Can’t Teach”, he was an Associate Editor at "Texas Monthly" in 1981, and General Editor at "Newsweek" from 1982 to 1986. He has written hundreds of articles, essays and reviews for such magazines as "Harper’s", "The New York Times Magazine", "The New York Review of Books", "Washington Monthly", "The Nation", "Esquire", "Slate", and "Salon". His other books include "The Higher Illiteracy" (University of Arkansas, 1988) and "Widow’s Web" (Simon & Schuster, 1993). Lyons writes a column  for the "Arkansas Times" that is syndicated nationally by Universal Uclick. Personal. Lyons is a native of Elizabeth, New Jersey. He graduated from Rutgers in 1965, and earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia in 1969. He taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Arkansas and University of Texas before becoming a full-time writer in 1976. He lives on a cattle farm in Perry County, (Gene writes on February 5, 2017 that he moved back to Little Rock last October) Arkansas, and has written that he "live[s] differently from most political writers: on a  gravel road in a rural county with no stoplights, probably more cows than people, and that voted 2-to-1 for McCain/Palin". He is not related to character actor Gene Lyons, Sr.