John Cullen Murphy, Jr. (born September 1, 1952) is an American writer and editor probably best known for his work at The Atlantic, where he served as managing editor (1985–2006).
He was born in New Rochelle, New York, and grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was educated at Amherst College, from which he graduated with honors in medieval history in 1974. Murphy's first magazine job was in the paste-up department of Change, a magazine devoted to higher education.
He became an editor of The Wilson Quarterly in 1977. Murphy, along with his father, John Cullen Murphy, wrote the comic strip Prince Valiant from the mid 70s to 2004. He is also the author of The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own (1999) and Are We Rome? (2007), which compares the politics and culture of Ancient Rome with that of the contemporary United States.
He currently serves as editor at large for Vanity Fair and lives in Massachusetts. He is on the advisory board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College. He has three children: Jack, Anna, and Tim.
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