About
Scott Ellsworth was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of a geologist and a domestic engineer. Educated in his hometown’s public schools, he grew up in a world of Little League baseball, Boy Scouts, Landmark Books, rock ‘n’ roll, Presbyterian youth group, movies, and school desegregation. An avid reader, his first attempt at writing a book, at around age twelve, was a thinly disguised version of Eight Bailed Out, a now long-forgotten World War II memoir, which he banged out a few pages of on his mother’s pale-green, manual Royal typewriter.
The author at age nine, back row, second from the right.
At Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where Scott was a classmate of Steve Jobs, he turned toward history and wrote his senior thesis on the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, which he later expanded into his first book, Death in a Promised Land. Following graduate school at Duke, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he spent a decade working as a historian at the Smithsonian Institution. Scott is the author of five books, the latest of which, Midnight on the Potomac, tells the story of the last fraught and fateful months of the American Civil War.
Married, and the father of twins, Scott lives with his wife, Betsy, and Hurley, their Welsh Corgi, in Ann Arbor, where he also teaches at the University of Michigan. He loves reading, dogs, Southern cooking, college basketball, backpacking, libraries, travel, fly fishing, and music of every kind.