Susan Sheehan graduated from Wellesley College in 1958, worked as a fact checker for Esquire for a year and a half, started writing book reviews for the New Republic in 1959, and light pieces for the New Yorker in 1960. After contributing "casuals" and Talk of the Town stories to the New Yorker, she became a staff writer for the magazine in 1961 and wrote her first nonfiction series in 1963.In 1965, Sheehan flew to Jakarta, Indonesia, to marry Neil Sheehan, a New York Times foreign correspondent she had met in New York City a few months earlier. In the summer of 1965, Neil was transferred to Saigon, where Sheehan wrote her first book, Ten Vietnamese, which was published in 1967. By then, Neil had been transferred to the Washington bureau of the Times. Sheehan commuted to New York for the next few decades, during which time she continued to write for the Times, the Boston Globe, and Washingtonian, in addition to authoring eight books. Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, published in 1982, won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1983. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, and the Open Society Institute. She served as the chair of the Pulitzer Prize nominating jury for general nonfiction in 1988 and 1994, and as a member of that jury in 1991. She was also a contributing writer for Architectural Digest for fifteen years. Most recently, she reviewed books for the Outlook section of the Washington Post.