Barbarians at the Gate

Bryan Burrough is an American journalist and author whose narrative nonfiction has shaped how general readers understand corporate finance, organized crime, and several other corners of twentieth-century American history. A longtime special correspondent for Vanity Fair and a former Wall Street Journal reporter, he is best known as the co-author, with John Helyar, of Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco. Published in 1989, Barbarians at the Gate documented the leveraged buyout battle for RJR Nabisco and became one of the defining business books of the late twentieth century. It spent more than forty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, was adapted as an HBO television film, and is still routinely assigned in MBA programs and corporate-finance courses as a primary case study in the LBO era of American capitalism. Burrough's later books extended his approach — long-form narrative reconstruction built on extensive interviews and primary documents — into other subjects. Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI documented the Dillinger-era bank robbers and the rise of J. Edgar Hoover's bureau, and was adapted as a Michael Mann film in 2009. The Big Rich examined the Texas oil barons of the twentieth century, and Days of Rage chronicled the radical underground of the 1970s. His most recent work has included Forget the Alamo, co-authored with Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford, a revisionist history of the Texas Revolution that drew significant attention and controversy on publication in 2021. He continues to write feature journalism on business, crime, and American history.