Philip Caputo

Philip Caputo was raised in Westchester, Illinois, a comfortable suburb west of Chicago. He is the son of middle-class Italian-American parents. He attended Purdue and Loyola Universities, graduating from the latter in 1964. Caputo enlisted in the Marines in 1960 and attended Officer Candidate School while still at university. After graduation, he was sent to Okinawa. He was then among the first American soldiers to be deployed to Vietnam in 1965, during the first years of the war. He served in the Marine Corps for three years, including a 16-month tour of duty in Vietnam. Caputo left Vietnam, as a soldier, in July 1966 and was discharged from the Marine Corps in mid-1967, after doing a final tour as the commanding officer of an infantry training company in North Carolina. He briefly became a part of the antiwar movement but did not commit to it. In 1968, Caputo started his career in journalism, first working for the Chicago Tribune as a general assignment and team investigative reporter until 1972. That year, he won a Pulitzer Prize, shared with several other reporters, for team investigative reporting on voting fraud in Chicago. He then spent the next five years working as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Beirut, Moscow, and Saigon, where he witnessed the Viet Cong’s invasion and the fall of Saigon in 1975. That same year, he left journalism to devote his time to writing books and magazine articles. His debut novel, Horn of Africa, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1980. Caputo is married to Leslie Ware, a former editor for Consumer Reports magazine, and they divide their time between Connecticut and Arizona. Caputo is also the father of two sons from a previous marriage—Marc, a political reporter for Politico, and Geoffrey, a jazz composer and music teacher.