He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1987 for Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land.
His father-in-law Harold Isaacs,[8] also a reporter and author, was a professor of political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
During 1973–75 he served as a New York Times correspondent in Saigon, covering South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand.
[10] He spent a year, 1984–85, as a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. to write Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, which explores the mutual perceptions and relationships between Arabs and Jews in Israel and the West Bank.
He was executive producer, writer, and narrator of a two-hour PBS documentary on Arab and Jew, which won a 1990 Dupont-Columbia award for broadcast journalism, and of a one-hour film, "Arab and Jew: Return to the Promised Land",[11] which aired on PBS during August 2002.
Shipler served as Chief Diplomatic Correspondent in the Washington Bureau of The New York Times until 1988.
From 1988 to 1990, he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing on transitions to democracy in Russia and Eastern Europe for The New Yorker and other publications.
His book, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America, based on five years of research into stereotyping and interactions across racial lines, was published in 1997.
Shipler was one of three authors invited by President Clinton to participate in his first town meeting on race.
On November 15, 2023, Stone Lantern Books published The Wind is Invisible: And Other Poems by Shipler.