Exploring American Culture
Steven Watts is a historian and writer who has charted the sweeping evolution of American culture in a number of highly praised books. His biographies of major figures—Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Dale Carnegie, Hugh Hefner, John F. Kennedy, and now Will Rogers—have explored the shaping of a modern American value-system devoted to consumerism, self-fulfillment, leisure, and personality. Two earlier books on the early republic era examined the shift from an older society of republican virtue to a 19th-century Victorian era devoted to self-control, individual character, and the self-made man.
Watts’s books have been translated into German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Polish, and Romanian. They have been reviewed in nearly every major newspaper and magazine in the United States, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, Denver Post, USA Today, New Republic, Commentary, Harper’s, Economist, Reason, and many others. They were also reviewed in scholarly journals, such as the Journal of American History and American Quarterly. Watts has written numerous essays for public affairs journals, such as The Atlantic, National Review, The Nation, American Spectator, Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsweek, The Federalist, Salon, and The American Mind.
Watts’s books have led to involvement in a number of media projects, including several films for PBS, the History Channel, and documentary venues in Germany and Brazil. He also has appeared on a variety of programs on CBS, NBC, CNBC, NPR, Fox, Fox News, C-Span, Bloomberg News, MSNBC, Telemundo, and the BBC. His Hefner biography, Mr. Playboy, has been optioned by Columbia Pictures and is now under development for a feature-length movie.
Watts is Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri, where he taught a wide range of courses in American history for thirty-six years. Over the course of his career, he won several teaching awards: Provost’s Junior Faculty Teaching Award, the William T. Kemper Excellence in Teaching Award, the Faculty-Alumni Award for Distinguished Achievement, and the (UM four-campus, system-wide) Thomas Jefferson Award for Teaching, Research, and Creative Activity. He also served two terms as chair of the Department of History.
A longtime resident of mid-Missouri, Watts lives on a fifty-acre farm with his wife, Patti, and daughter, Olivia. He is an avid gardener, tennis player, fisherman, and mule caretaker. He also plays in an Americana band, Flyover Country, that performs widely in the area.
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