Paul Hendrickson, a senior lecturer in the department of English in the School of Arts & Sciences, has received Penn State’s Humanities Institute Outstanding Alumni Award. Since its establishment in 2017-2018, the Humanities Institute has hosted an annual lecture each spring to celebrate the work of the humanities. In 2018-2019, the institute introduced the Alumni Award, given to a Penn State graduate who has made a significant impact in the humanities.

Mr. Hendrickson is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner of it once–for his 2003 Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and its Legacy. His The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award. His 2011 Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost was a New York Times best-seller. He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. He has been a faculty member at Penn since 1998, and for two decades before that he was a staff writer at The Washington Post.