Alan Pell Crawford (born 1953) is an American author and journalist who, in his books and articles, has written on the period of the United States' founding and, in a recent departure, published How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain.
His previous book, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson, a Washington Post best-seller, casts new light on the retirement of the nation’s third president and author of the Declaration of Independence.
A journalist and political analyst, a former U.S. Senate speechwriter and congressional press secretary,[2] Crawford is also a public speaker, who has spoken at the Union Club of the City of New York,[3] Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C.,[4] and the Virginia Center for History and Culture,[5] as well as historical societies and book groups, and been interviewed on the Motley Fool podcast,[6] and Biographers International Organization podcast,[7] as well as Coast to Coast AM.
[16] Crawford wrote his second book about Ann Cary Randolph Morris entitled Unwise Passions: The True Story of a Remarkable Woman and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth-Century America, published in 2000, using sources from archives throughout the United States.
[18] The Associated Press stated that in the Twilight at Monticello Crawford “had access to thousands of family letters—some previously unexamined by historians—that he used to create his portrait of the complex idealist, [and] there are some surprising tidbits to be found.”[19]