Greg Grandin is the author of Fordlandia, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A Professor of History at New York University, Grandin has published several other award-winning books, including Empire’s Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and The Blood of Guatemala.
Toni Morrison called Grandin’s new work, The Empire of Necessity, “compelling, brilliant and necessary.” Based on years of research on four continents, the book narrates the history of a slave-ship revolt that inspired Herman Melville’s other masterpiece, Benito Cereno. Philip Gourevitch describes it as a “rare book in which the drama of the action and the drama of ideas are equally measured, a work of history and of literary reflection that is as urgent as it is timely.”
Books in order of publication:
The Blood of Guatemala: a History of Race and Nation. Duke University Press. 2000.
The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. University of Chicago Press. 2004.
Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. Macmillan. 2007.
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City. Macmillan. 2010.
Who Is Rigoberta Menchu?, Verso, 2011.
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, Metropolitan Books, 2014
Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman, Metropolitan Books, 2015
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, Metropolitan Books, 2019
America, América: A New History of the New World. Penguin Press. 2025
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