Cullen Murphy '74
Current Home: Medfield, Massachusetts
Place of Birth: New Rochelle, New York
Education: St. Mary High School (Greenwich, Connecticut)
Amherst College (1974)
Why did you choose to come to Amherst?
It was small, it was good, and it was the place where my father, who never went to college, always said he would have liked to have gone.
Cullen Murphy is editor-at-large of The Atlantic, where he served as managing editor from 1985 to 2006. From 2006 to 2018 he was editor-at-large of Vanity Fair. Murphy is the author of a number of books, including Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America and God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World. For 25 years he wrote the comic strip Prince Valiant, which was drawn by his father, the illustrator John Cullen Murphy. His most recent book, Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe, a memoir, was published last November. Murphy has been a member of the board of governors of the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Emily Dickinson Museum. He is the chair of the board of trustees of Amherst College.
Learn more about Cartoon County on Cullen's website.
Photo credit: Gasper Tringale