Kevin Birmingham received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard, where he was a Lecturer in English and in History & Literature as well as an instructor in the university's Writing Program. He was a bartender in a Dublin pub featured in Ulysses for one day before he was unceremoniously fired. The Most Dangerous Book was a New York Times bestseller. It received the PEN New England Award for Nonfiction in 2015 and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2016. The Truman Capote Award has never before been given to a writer's first book.