Julie M. Fenster
Author
J.M Fenster’s books have won multiple awards and a place on The New York Times non-fiction bestsellers list. Known as a Presidential historian with a fresh approach, she combines meticulous original research with the story-teller’s art in bringing light to newly uncovered situations, personalities and trends. Enthusiastically praised as “witty” in a review in the Sunday The New York Times, she was compared to Mark Twain in Kirkus Reviews.
Fenster began her career with books pioneering the sociology of automobiles, before moving on the now classic Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America’s Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It, a book that is assigned reading in many medical schools. She wrote another book on medical history, Mavericks, Miracles and Medicine, which became the basis for a two-part documentary on the Arts & Entertainment network.
Moving into Presidential history, Fenster wrote The Case of Abraham Lincoln, about the 16th President’s life just before his national influence. Using materials never accessed before for any book, she re-assembled Lincoln’s famed “Lost Speech” (lost no longer), which the Lincoln Foundation cited as a “a seminal and vigorous analysis of the rediscovered speech.” That book was followed by FDR’s Shadow, which traced the complicated inter-relationships of Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt and Louis Howe. The F.D.R. Library in Hyde Park named it the most valuable book written on Franklin’s retreat due to his paralysis and his return to politics.
With startling new research for Jefferson’s America, Fenster uncovered the story of the five explorations into the West launched by Thomas Jefferson, who balanced the famed Lewis & Clark expedition with four others that had far greater geo-political implications then and even up to the present day.
With her reputation for Presidential history, Fenster wrote First Freedom, the perennial PBS documentary on the founders’ inclusion of religion in the Bill of Rights. Her co-screenwriter was Douglas Brinkley.
At Home
Julie Fenster was born in Upstate New York and graduated from Colgate University. She worked for Princeton Publishing as well as CBS Inc. Magazines, where she wrote about classic and performance cars. American Heritage commissioned articles from her on a variety of historical topics and she soon thereafter turned her career to writing books.
Fenster lives on a horse farm in Upstate New York and owns the Uplands Ruthie thoroughbred racing stable. Among the stable's successful horses was Naughty Prince. He went on to a show career, but others -- those who decline further exertion -- come home to the farm in retirement.
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