Born in Atlanta, Georgia and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Boorstin graduated with highest honors from Harvard College and received his doctorate from Yale University. As a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, he won a coveted "double first" in two degrees of law and was admitted as a barrister-at-law of the Inner Temple, London. He is also a member of the Massachusetts Bar.

He has been visiting professor at the University of Rome, the University of Geneva, the University of Kyoto and the University of Puerto Rico. In Paris he was the first incumbent chair in American History at the Sorbonne, and at Cambridge University, England, he was the Pitt Professor and a Fellow of Trinity College.

He has received more than 50 honorary degrees and has been decorated by the governments of France, Belgium, Portugal and Japan. Dr. Boorstin has been awarded the Phi Beta Kappa's Distinguished Service to the Humanities Award and the Charles Frankel Prize of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1989 he received the National Book Award for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. His books have been translated into more than 25 languages.

Dr. Boorstin's many books include the trilogy The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1958), which won the Bancroft Prize; The Americans: The National Experience (1965), which won the Parkman Prize; and The Americans: The Democratic Experience, which won the Pulitzer Prize, among other awards.

His other works include The Mysterious Science of the Law (1941), The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948), The Genius of American Politics (1953), The Image (1962, 1987), The Republic of Technology (1978), and Hidden History(1987).

In addition he is the editor of An American Primer and the 30-volume series The Chicago History of American Civilization. For young readers, he wrote The Landmark History of the American People (new edition, 1987).

The Discoverers (1983), Boorstin's best-selling history of man's search to know the world and himself, was awarded the Watson Davis Prize of the History of Science Society. The Creators, a history of man's achievements in the arts and companion to The Discoverers, was published by Random House in 1992.

In Cleopatra's Nose: Essays of the Unexpected, published by Random House in 1994, Boorstin presents essays on the role that the unexpected plays in history.

His latest publication, The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader, includes selections from most of his books. It was published by Modern Library in 1995.