Cullen Murphy is the editor at large of The Atlantic.
Previously, from 1985 to 2006, he served as The Atlantic's managing editor. Starting in 2007, for more than a decade, he was the editor at large of Vanity Fair. For 25 years he wrote the comic strip Prince Valiant, which was drawn by his father, the illustrator John Cullen Murphy.
Murphy's most recent book is Just Passing Through: A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), built around the diaries and photographs of the correspondent, critic, artist, and confidant Milton Gendel.
The American Crisis: What Went Wrong, How We Recover (Simon & Schuster, 2020), a collection, which he edited, of articles by Atlantic writers, was published in 2020.
Murphy’s earlier books include Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017); Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (Houghton Mifflin, 2007); and God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (Houghton Mifflin, 2012). Murphy is a former member of the board of governors of the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Emily Dickinson Museum, and from 2012 through 2018 was the chair of the board of trustees of Amherst College. Murphy is also the author of Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (HarperCollins, 1992, with William L. Rathje), Anderson & Sheppard: A Style Is Born (Quercus, 2011, with Gradyon Carter), and the essay collection Just Curious (Houghton Mifflin, 1995). He lives in Massachusetts.