Tony Judt was born in London in 1948, but spent most of his career in America. He studied history at Cambridge and then earned his doctorate in France. His first major writings were about France's historical left-wing movements, particularly the French Socialist Party. Judt started working on Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 in 1989 when he was employed by New York University. Published in 2005, it went on to win numerous honors; in 2006 it was shortlisted for the nonfiction Pulitzer Prize and captured the Arthur Ross Book Award. Judt built a storied career as a public intellectual on the back of this success, and died in 2010 after a very public battle with the degenerative and fatal neurological disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.