Margaret Talbot is an American essayist and non-fiction writer.[1] She is also the daughter of the veteran Warner Bros. actor Lyle Talbot, whom she profiled in an October 2012 The New Yorker article and in her book The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century (Riverhead Books, 2012).[2] She is also the co-author with her brother David Talbot of a book about political activists in the 1960s, By the Light of Burning Dreams (HarperCollins, 2021).[3]
She is a staff writer at The New Yorker.[4] She has also written for The New Republic,[5] The New York Times Magazine,[6] and The Atlantic Monthly.[7] and was a regular panelist on the Slate podcast "The DoubleX Gabfest".[8][9]
Her first book, The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father's Twentieth Century, was published in November 2012 by Riverhead.
Her second book, co-authored with David Talbot, "By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution," was published in June 2021 by HarperCollins.
She was formerly a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.[10]
Her brother Stephen Talbot is a public television documentary producer. [11] Her nephew is filmmaker Joe Talbot.