William Van Duzer Lawrence IV is a fellow of the College of William and Mary, having studied English there as an undergraduate. He moved to Washington DC as a young staffer for President Mario Cuomo, eventually becoming Press Secretary in the final disastrous six months of the administration. His memoir of that period, Spin City, became a bestseller with its genuinely funny tone and its eye for the sentimental anecdote.
Lawrence then moved to California to take up a position as Communications Director of the UCLA med school. Bruised by his experience in Washington, Lawrence became increasingly enthusiastic about hiking. He began to organise excursions for the young med students into the hills around Los Angeles, and these trips gave him the idea for his next book. A contemplation of the demands put on young doctors and their struggle for growth, it relied on an overarching metaphor of plants trying to thrive in the often inhospitable rocky grounds of the hills. Critics thought that Scrubs was too sentimental, but it remains a beloved text and has yet to go out of print.
In 2009, an encounter with a mountain lion while jogging led to his next book. The curiosity about how Los Angeles could be both the quintessential megacity of the English-speaking world while also having a population of big cats led to a meditation on the balance of nature and urbanism, and Cougar Town became a hit with the revitalised Democratic Green movement of the 2010s.
Lawrence spent the next decade working on a passion project, a serious biography of Theodore Roosevelt. This concentrated specifically Roosevelt's time in the west as a young man, a natural fit for Lawrence's preoccupation with politics, nature and his concern about what it meant to be a healthy adult. Ted: Lasso was better received as a work of literature than history, but is the most successful biography of the decade thus far.
His new work, a reflection on the old Democratic establishment's retreat after the Cuomo presidency is tentatively titled Shrinking.