Martha Sherrill was born in Palo Alto and raised in suburban Los Angeles, first in Glendale and later in Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach. She graduated from UCLA where she studied film and art history. For several years after college, she worked at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. before landing a job at the Washington Post, initially as a fashion assistant in the Style Section and then as an essayist and general assignment feature writer covering the arts and politics.
During her ten year tenure at the Post, Sherrill became known for her penetrating studies of personality and for capturing the intersection of public and private. She parlayed her passion and knowledge of film into many memorable interviews with legendary directors and actors, including Clint Eastwood, Bernardo Bertolucci and Peter O’Toole. Her essays ranged from a portrait of the homeless, to a psychological exploration of political fanaticism, to an award-winning series on the life and psychological evolution of Hillary Clinton.
In addition to the newspaper, she has written for Allure, Conde Nast Traveler, Elle, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Outside, Town & Country, Tricycle, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. As a contributing editor at Esquire for many years, she specialized in profiles of complex personalities and difficult interview subjects – including Don Imus, Rudy Guiliani, Steve Martin – and wrote a poignant, candid personal essay about Peter Sherrill, her enigmatic father, (“My Father, The Bachelor.”)
In her four books, Sherrill travels easily between fiction and non-fiction, keenly observing human nature, often exploring the complicated nature of the self in the midst of society. Her first book, The Buddha from Brooklyn(Random House, 2000), a work of non-fiction, is a study of religious devotion inside a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Poolesville, Maryland. Her next book, My Last Movie Star, (Random House, 2003), is a novel about the vagaries of fame and the cult of modern day celebrity. The Ruins of California(Penguin Press, 2006) came next, a critically acclaimed coming of age story set against the backdrop of the 1970s. Her most personal work to date, the book was inspired by Sherrill’s own struggle as a child to find balance in two radically different worlds – the vibrant bohemia of San Francisco’s North Beach and the staid conservatism of suburban Pasadena.
She returned to nonfiction with Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain (Penguin Press, March, 2008), the powerful and inspiring saga of a man widely credited with preserving the Akita dog breed in the snow country of Japan during World War II. As much about marriage as it is about dogs, Sherrill’s talent for provoking candid interviews, use of archival research, and instinct for narrative come together to create an entire world – village life in the mountains of Japan – that most Americans know little about.
She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, writer and critic William Powers, and their son. She is working on a memoir, The Gift House, about her family’s move from Washington, D.C to a small town on Cape Cod, and their adjustment to a quieter life, long New England winters, and Sherrill’s volunteer job working at a small salvage operation on the grounds of their town dump.
Bio
During her ten year tenure at the Post, Sherrill became known for her penetrating studies of personality and for capturing the intersection of public and private. She parlayed her passion and knowledge of film into many memorable interviews with legendary directors and actors, including Clint Eastwood, Bernardo Bertolucci and Peter O’Toole. Her essays ranged from a portrait of the homeless, to a psychological exploration of political fanaticism, to an award-winning series on the life and psychological evolution of Hillary Clinton.
In addition to the newspaper, she has written for Allure, Conde Nast Traveler, Elle, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Outside, Town & Country, Tricycle, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. As a contributing editor at Esquire for many years, she specialized in profiles of complex personalities and difficult interview subjects – including Don Imus, Rudy Guiliani, Steve Martin – and wrote a poignant, candid personal essay about Peter Sherrill, her enigmatic father, (“My Father, The Bachelor.”)
In her four books, Sherrill travels easily between fiction and non-fiction, keenly observing human nature, often exploring the complicated nature of the self in the midst of society. Her first book, The Buddha from Brooklyn (Random House, 2000), a work of non-fiction, is a study of religious devotion inside a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Poolesville, Maryland. Her next book, My Last Movie Star, (Random House, 2003), is a novel about the vagaries of fame and the cult of modern day celebrity. The Ruins of California (Penguin Press, 2006) came next, a critically acclaimed coming of age story set against the backdrop of the 1970s. Her most personal work to date, the book was inspired by Sherrill’s own struggle as a child to find balance in two radically different worlds – the vibrant bohemia of San Francisco’s North Beach and the staid conservatism of suburban Pasadena.
She returned to nonfiction with Dog Man: An Uncommon Life on a Faraway Mountain (Penguin Press, March, 2008), the powerful and inspiring saga of a man widely credited with preserving the Akita dog breed in the snow country of Japan during World War II. As much about marriage as it is about dogs, Sherrill’s talent for provoking candid interviews, use of archival research, and instinct for narrative come together to create an entire world – village life in the mountains of Japan – that most Americans know little about.
She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, writer and critic William Powers, and their son. She is working on a memoir, The Gift House, about her family’s move from Washington, D.C to a small town on Cape Cod, and their adjustment to a quieter life, long New England winters, and Sherrill’s volunteer job working at a small salvage operation on the grounds of their town dump.