George Packer is a U.S. journalist, award-winning author, playwright, and a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of ten books, including The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the 2013 National Book Award); Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (winner of the 2019 Hitchens Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize); and, most recently, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal. Before joining The Atlantic in 2018, he was a staff writer at The New Yorker for fifteen years. He writes about American politics, culture, and U.S. foreign policy.
Packer has been a Guggenheim Fellow and twice a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; he was also a 2016–17 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. He was an Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fellow in 2017 and an Arizona State University Future of War Fellow in 2018. Packer is a graduate of Yale College and served in the Peace Corps in Togo.