American · b. 1953
S. C. Gwynne (Samuel C. Gwynne) is an American journalist and historian, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1953 and raised in Connecticut. He studied history at Princeton and took a master's degree in writing from Johns Hopkins, then spent two decades in journalism as a correspondent and editor at Time and as executive editor of Texas Monthly. His first major history, Empire of the Summer Moon (2010), told the rise and fall of the Comanches through the lives of Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah; it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and became a long-running bestseller. He followed it with Rebel Yell (2014), a life of Stonewall Jackson, and Hymns of the Republic (2019), on the last year of the Civil War, as well as a book on college football. His narrative histories combine deep archival research with a reporter's pace and an eye for violent, vivid scenes. He lives in Austin, Texas.