American author Jim Cullen has written extensively about American culture and history. Born in New York City in 1962, Cullen is a teacher at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York and has previously taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Harvard, and Brown. His list of published works includes historical biographies about Bruce Springsteen and Martin Scorsese, a cultural history about the television show All in the Family, and books about American presidents and wars. His essays and articles have appeared in Rolling Stone, USA Today, and The Washington Post.

This book, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, fits naturally in Cullen’s bibliography. His specialty is American popular culture, and the concept of the American Dream, though deeply rooted in American history, also remains a fixture of the pop culture landscape. As a ubiquitous yet ambiguous idea, the American Dream requires comprehensive treatment, which Cullen provides as a historian who has delved into numerous aspects of American life that all deal either directly or indirectly with the American Dream.