Marc Aronson is an author, editor, publisher, speaker, and historian who believes that young people, especially pre-teens and teenagers, are smart, passionate, and capable of engaging with interesting ideas in interesting ways.
He writes books, visits schools, teaches classes, and publishes books that affirm this belief. His mission is to inspire young people to ask questions, to look around, behind, inside of the stories the world tells us - whether that means being a detective, examining the clues history has left behind, or a reporter, telling the truth about the modern world.
A committed internationalist, Aronson has published two books that were selected as the best books in translation, and created Edge, an imprint designed to bring the voices of coming of age from around the world to American readers. It is his conviction that the mixing of genes, of ideas, of cultures, of networks of trade is the given of the world young people are entering. He is also a supporter of the Guys Read project who feels young males are often neglected by a reading world oriented towards females.
Aronson has a doctorate in American History - his focus was on William Crary Brownell, Edith Wharton's editor, and he published conclusions as a lengthy essay in the New York Times Book Review. He periodically reviews books for the Los Angeles Times Books Review, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and publishes essays in journals devoted to reading and literature. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, the author Marina Budhos and their two sons.
The award-winning books he has written for those readers include Sir Walter Ralegh and the Quest for El Dorado (Clarion, 2000), the first book to win the Robert F. Sibert award for the best in nonfiction; Witch-Hunt: Mysteries of the Salem Witch Trials (Atheneum, 2003), a School Library Journal best book; Art Attack: A Short Cultural History of the Avant-Garde (Clarion, 1998), a New York Times Notable Book. His two books of essays for adults about teenage readers: Exploding the Myths: The Truth About Teenagers and Reading (Scarecrow, 2001), and Beyond the Pale; New Essays for a New Era (Scarecrow, 2003) have been praised as "required reading for anyone who cares about young adults and their literature" (School Library Journal).
Aronson's book, John Winthrop, Oliver Cromwell and the Land of Promise (Clarion, 2004) continues the story of colonial America he began with Ralegh, and is the first book for young readers to show how the religious passions of the early Puritans can help us to understand the viewpoint of modern Islamic fundamentalists. His trilogy concludes with The Real Revolution, The Global Story of American Independence (Clarion 2005) an account of the run-up to the American Revolution viewed in a global perspective in which Robert Clive plays as large a role as George Washington, and events in London and India are as important as those in Boston and Virginia. He is currently working on the first global history of race prejudice written for younger readers.