Margaret Talbot is an American journalist and nonfiction writer. She is the daughter of the veteran Warner Bros. actor Lyle Talbot, whom she profiled in an October 2012 article of The New Yorker and in her book The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century (Riverhead Books, 2012). She is also the co-author with her brother David Talbot of a book about political activists in the 1960s, By the Light of Burning Dreams (HarperCollins, 2021).

Life

She is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has also written for The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly. and was a regular panelist on the Slate podcast "The DoubleX Gabfest". Her first book, The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father's Twentieth Century, was published in November 2012 by Riverhead. Her second book, co-authored with brother David, "By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution," was published in June 2021 by HarperCollins. She was formerly a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. Her brother Stephen Talbot is a public television documentary producer. Filmmaker Joe Talbot is her nephew.

Awards

Books

Essays and reporting

Anthologies

Book reviews