Anne Fadiman won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, her 1997 report on the medical and cultural struggles of an immigrant Hmong family living in California with an epileptic child. Fadiman was a founding editor of the Library of Congress magazine Civilization, and in 1997 became the editor of the Phi Beta Kappa quarterly The American Scholar. Though her work at The American Scholar was widely praised, she was dismissed in 2004 in what was described as a budget dispute. In 2005 she became the first Paul E. Fracis Writer in Residence at Yale University. She is also the author of Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998).

Extra credit: Fadiman is a 1975 graduate of Harvard... Fadiman's father was Clifton Fadiman, the literary raconteur and host of the radio quiz show Information Please; her mother was Annalee Whitmore Jacoby Fadiman, co-author with Theodore White of the 1946 book Thunder Out of China.