Thomas McNamee
Thomas McNamee, born Charles Thomas McNamee III on July 31, 1947, in Memphis, Tennessee, is an American writer and Guggenheim Fellow. He has written four nonfiction books on natural history and conservation, a novel, and two biographies of notable culinary figures—Alice Waters and Craig Claiborne. His essays and articles have appeared in Audubon, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Saveur, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, and other publications. He wrote the documentary film Alexander Calder, shown on PBS’s American Masters in 1998, which won a George W. Peabody Award and an Emmy. He has also contributed reviews to The New York Times Book Review.
In 2016 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for a book in progress, The Inner Life of Cats. Earlier in his career, he worked in music, joining Columbia Records in 1969 and producing the double album Music to Eat by the Hampton Grease Band in 1971; the album was initially a flop but later gained fame and was reissued on its 25th anniversary.
His books on natural history and conservation include The Grizzly Bear (1984), Nature First: Keeping Our Wild Places and Wild Creatures Wild (1987), The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone (1997), and The Killing of Wolf Number Ten (2014). He also published a novel, A Story of Deep Delight (1990). In culinary biographies, he wrote Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution (2007) and Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance (2012).
Thomas McNamee is the son of Gladys Runyan McNamee and Charles Thomas McNamee Jr. He grew up mainly in Memphis, with three years in New York City, and attended Yale University, where he won prizes for fiction and poetry and studied with Robert Penn Warren. He graduated magna cum laude in 1969.
Personal life: He married Louise Rossett in 1970; they divorced in 1993, the same year he moved to the West Boulder Ranch in Park County, Montana. He married Elizabeth Yates in 1996; they moved to San Francisco in 1998 and later to Livingston, Montana, in 2021.
Conservation work: He served on the board of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition from 1986 to 1992 and was its chairman from 1987 to 1989, a period that included the Yellowstone fires of 1988. He worked to restore gray wolves to Yellowstone. He also served on the boards of Rare (1998–2004) and the Center for Education about Sustainable Agriculture (2007–2009).
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 03:55 (CET).