American writer Thomas Mallon was BOTD in 1951. Born in Glen Cove, New York to a middle-class family, he studied at Brown University and Harvard University, followed by post-graduate study at Cambridge University in England. In 1984, he published A Book of One’s Own, an historical survey of famous diarists including Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin, winning him a Rockefeller Fellowship and a professorship at Vassar College. A prolific author, his literary output includes the novel Arts and Sciences; Stolen Words, a critical study of literary plagiarism; Henry and Clara, a fictional re-imagining of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln; and non-fiction novels about the key figures in the John F. Kennedy assassination and the Watergate scandal. He also worked as literary editor for GQ magazine in the 1990s, writing the popular Doubting Thomas column, and wrote reviews and literary criticism for The New York Times, The New Yorker and other publications. He is best known to LGBTQ readers for his 2007 novel Fellow Travelers, a love story between two closeted gay men, tracing their relationship from the McCarthyite anti-gay purges of the 1950s, to the gay liberation movements of the 1970s and the HIV/AIDS crisis. A critical and commercial success, the book was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards, and was adapted by Ron Nyswaner into a 2025 TV drama series starring Hollywood A-Gays Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey. Later that year, Mallon published The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983-1994, tracing his college years and coming-of-age as a gay man during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. A life-long Republican, he left the party in 2016 following the presidential nomination of Donald Trump. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his long-time partner William Bodenschatz, and lectures in English at George Washington University.