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Toby Lester is a writer and editor. He is the author of two best-selling books of popular history, Da Vinci's Ghost (2012) and The Fourth Part of the World (2009), and has written extensively for national publications, among them The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The American Scholar, The Wilson Quarterly, BBC Magazine, and the London Times. His writing has also been included in several anthologies, including the New Literary History of America (2009).
Lester today works primarily as an editor. He serves part-time as a senior editor for Harvard Business Review but also regularly edits books and articles as a freelancer. Recent books he has worked on include The Hopeful Skeptic, by Jamil Zaki (2024); The Abundant University, by Michael D. Smith (2023); We the Scientists, by Amy Dockser Marcus (2023); T, by Carole Hooven (2021); Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds, by Paul Farmer (2020); The Shadow Drawing, by Francesca Fiorani (2020); The Age of Living Machines, by Susan Hockfield (2019); In Hoffa's Shadow, by Jack Goldsmith (2019); The Happiness Curve, by Jonathan Rauch (2018); The Founder's Mentality, by Chris Zuk and James Allen (2016); and Our Kids, by Robert Putnam (2016). Lester also periodically teaches editing at Boston College and has served as a thesis advisor for MIT's graduate science-journalism program.
Between 1995 and 2006, Lester worked for The Atlantic in a variety of editorial capacities: as a staff editor, as the executive editor of the website, as a senior editor, and as the managing editor. He has also served as the editorial director of Boston (2012-2013), the editor of Country Journal (2000-2001), and the executive editor of DoubleTake (1999-2000).
Prior to 1995, Lester worked in international relief and development. From 1992 to 1994, he monitored intifada-related activity in the West Bank as a UN refugee-affairs officer; from 1990 to 1992 he helped establish Peace Corps programs in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union; and from 1988 to 1990 he taught English in Yemen as a Peace Corps volunteer. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1987 with degrees in English and French, and now lives in the Boston area with his wife and three daughters.
Lester comes from a family of writers. His father, James Lester, was a member of the first successful American Everest expedition, and is the author of Too Marvelous for Words (1994), the only biography of the jazz pianist Art Tatum. His mother, Valerie Lester, is the author of, among other works, Giambatissta Bodoni: His Life and His World (2015); Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens (2004), a biography of her great-great grandfather, Hablot Knight Browne, who was Charles Dickens’s principal illustrator; and Fasten Your Seat Belts: History and Heroism in the Pan Am Cabin (1995). His one sibling, Alison Jean Lester, is the author of the novels Yuki Means Happiness (2017) and Lillian on Life (2015), and the short-story collection Locked Out: Stories Far from Home (2006).