Lawrence Ingrassia

Lawrence Ingrassia is an author and award-winning journalist, having worked as a senior editor at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times before retiring from newspapers in 2017.

Ingrassia’s second book, A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery, part memoir and part medical detective story, intertwines the heartbreaking saga of his and other families’ puzzling over the many seemingly unrelated cancers afflicting them – often starting in childhood – along with the fascinating and inspiring search by doctors for an answer. It took more than twenty years, but they eventually tracked down the culprit to a very rare inherited mutation, an extraordinary scientific breakthrough that helped unlock the mysteries of and improve the treatment of cancer.

His first book, Billion Dollar Brand Club, published in 2020, explored the growth of disruptive e-commerce startups – like Dollar Shave Club, Tuft & Needle, Warby Parker, and ThirdLove, and countless others – creating new consumer product brands. It showed the many ways that technology has leveled the playing field, including in marketing, manufacturing, and distribution, and enabled these newcomers to challenge long-dominant companies. It was named one of the best business books of 2020 by Inc. magazine, the Society of Business Editors and Writers, and Entrepreneur’s Handbook, and selected as one of the “New Books We Recommend” by the New York Times.

In Ingrassia’s decades-long newspaper career, journalists directed by him won five Pulitzer Prizes – for national reporting, explanatory reporting, international reporting, and commentary – as well as Polk, Loeb and other awards. In 2009, he was honored with the annual Minard editor award given by the Gerald Loeb Awards, for overseeing coverage of causes of the financial market meltdown in the fall of 2008. In 2017, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers honored him with its distinguished achievement award. Before becoming an editor, Ingrassia worked as a reporter in Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston, and London for the Wall Street Journal.