Michael Lesy (born 1945) is an American non-fiction writer. His books, which combine historical photographs with original writing, include Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties (1976), Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life (1982), Visible Light (1985), Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties (2007), Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century (with Lisa Stoffer, 2013), Looking Backward: A Photographic Portrait of the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (2017), and Snapshots 1971–77 (September 2021).
Lesy grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio. He received a B.A. in theoretical sociology from Columbia University, an M.A. in American social history from the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. in American cultural history from Rutgers University. He taught at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, from 1990 to 2020, and is a Hampshire emeritus professor of literary journalism. Ironically, Lesy explained in a 2003 interview, "I wanted to make it a movie. But it cost too much to produce. So it was just a poor man’s way of making a movie in book form."
In 2006 the United States Artists Foundation named Lesy its first Simon Fellow. In 2013 Lesy was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Photography Studies.
Bibliography
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! style="background:#b0c4de;"| Year
! style="background:#b0c4de;"| Title
! style="background:#b0c4de;"| Publisher
|-
| 1973
| Wisconsin Death Trip
| Pantheon Books
|-
| 1976
| Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties
| Pantheon Books
|-
| 1980
| Time Frames: The Meaning of Family Pictures
| Pantheon Books
|-
| 1982
| Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life
| Pantheon Books
|-
| 1985
| Visible Light
| Crown Publishing Group
|-
| 1987
| The Forbidden Zone
| Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
|-
| 1991
| Rescues: The Lives of Heroes
| Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
|-
| 1997
| Dreamland: America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
| The New Press
|-
| 2002
| Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943
| W. W. Norton & Company
|-
| 2005
| Angel's World: The New York Photographs of Angelo Rizzuto
| W. W. Norton & Company
|-
| 2007
| Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties
| W. W. Norton & Company
|-
| 2013
| Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century (with Lisa Stoffer)
| W. W. Norton & Company
|-
| 2017
| Looking Backward: A Photographic Portrait of the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
| W. W. Norton & Company
|-
| 2021
| Snapshots 1971–77 (September 17 scheduled publication)
| Blast Books
|}