Jean Strouse (born 1945) is an American biographer, cultural administrator, and critic.

[2] She was a book critic at Newsweek magazine from 1979 to 1983, and won a MacArthur Fellowship in September 2001.

In 2003 Strouse was appointed the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Strouse's book Alice James: A Biography, appeared in 1980 and won a Bancroft Prize.

Strouse's next book, Morgan: American Financier (1999), earned praise for its realistic, unexaggerated portrayal of Morgan's personality and its explanations of complex financial topics in understandable terms.