John Sedgwick

John Shaw Sedgwick was born in Boston on 5 May 1954, the youngest child of R. Minturn Sedgwick, known as Duke, a Boston investment adviser born in 1899, and Emily Ames Sedgwick (nee Lincoln). He grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts, and was introduced as a child to the Sedgwick Pie in Stockbridge Cemetery, the concentric family plot around Theodore Sedgwick's monument. Forebears included House Speaker Theodore Sedgwick, novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick and 1960s figure Edie Sedgwick. He attended Groton School, where relatives' names lined the plaques, and graduated from Harvard University in 1977 with an A.B. in English, contributing to The Harvard Crimson.

Sedgwick began publishing nationally as a Harvard senior, including an Esquire piece with Anne Fadiman on bathroom graffiti and a Harvard Magazine article on Minoan archaeology. He worked as an editor at Newsweek and Self Care and wrote for The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ and others. Books included Night Vision (1982), Rich Kids (1985), The Peaceable Kingdom (1988), novels The Dark House (2001) and The Education of Mrs. Bemis (2003), and the memoir In My Blood (2007). Later nonfiction covered the Hamilton-Burr duel in War of Two (2015), Cherokee history in Blood Moon (2018) and the Santa Fe-Rio Grande railroad contest in From the River to the Sea (2021). War of Two won the New Jersey Society of the Cincinnati History Prize and was a George Washington Prize finalist. At his death he was working on a psychological-suspense novel.

Sedgwick's first marriage was to writer Megan Marshall; they had two daughters, Sara and Josephine, and the marriage ended in 2007. In 2013 he married journalist Rana Foroohar. He is also survived by stepchildren Darya and Alex Foroohar, six grandchildren, brother Robert and sister Emily. Around age 46 he experienced a severe mood crisis, later writing that medication and therapy brought him back from the brink, and that conversation with his half-brother Harry about a shared family history of mood disorders shaped In My Blood.

Sedgwick died on 30 August 2026 at his home in Brooklyn, New York, at the age of 72. His daughter Sara Sedgwick Brown said he succumbed to the illness he had tried so hard to understand, referring to the mood disorders that ran through Sedgwick family history and that he had examined in his memoir. A service was planned for 10 October 2026 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, with burial in the Sedgwick Pie following the family's horse-drawn funeral tradition.

Sedgwick left a body of reporting and narrative history that treated American privilege without piety, from zoo keepers and rich kids to founding fathers, Cherokee leaders and western railroad barons. In My Blood remains a touchstone for readers of family memoir and mental-illness history. Colleagues remembered his wit and empathy as a reporter; author Pagan Kennedy said he documented a culture in decline from inside and outside at once. He will be buried among generations of Sedgwicks in Stockbridge, closing a circle he had chronicled since childhood.