Thomas Maier

THOMAS MAIER is an award-winning author, investigative journalist and television producer, with two hit TV primetime shows based on his books in recent years acclaimed by The New York Times. His new book, "THE INVISIBLE SPY: Churchill's Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America's First Secret Agent of World War II" will be published March 25, 2025 by Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. It is the untold WWII story of Ernest Cuneo, a former NFL player turned White House insider, who worked with Churchill’s undercover agents in New York City to conduct the biggest foreign spy operation ever within the US, and inspired Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. Maier is the author and a television producer of the Emmy-winning Showtime drama series MASTERS OF SEX, adapted from his biography of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, which ran from 2013-2016 starring actors Michael Sheen, Lizzy Caplan, Allison Janney, Jeremy Strong, Annaleigh Ashford and many others. When first published, Masters of Sex was called "eye-opening" and "a bombshell" by the Sunday New York Times Book Review, "well written with good humor" by the NY Times daily reviewer Dwight Garner, "an intelligent and well-conceived biography" by The Washington Post, along with a starred review by Booklist and The Chicago Tribune listed it among the paper's favorite non-fiction books of the year. Maier is also the author/producer and on-air commentator for 2024’s MAFIA SPIES, a six-part docuseries about the CIA’s hiring of two top gangsters to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro during the Cold War, which appeared on Paramount+Showtime and was highly praised in The New York Times. In a starred review, Booklist called Mafia Spies "brilliant" and "enormous fun" and "standout" among non-fiction spy books. Maier’s other books include ALL THAT GLITTERS: Anna Wintour, Tina Brown, and the Rivalry Inside America’s Richest Empire (2019); WHEN LIONS ROAR: The Churchills and the Kennedys (2014), which was the subject of a C-Span televised forum at the JFK Presidential Library; and DR. SPOCK: An American Life, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His 2003 book, THE KENNEDYS: America's Emerald Kings was featured on ABC's "20/20" program, the CBS Evening News, and NBC's "Today" show. "The Kennedys" was praised as one of the top 10 all-time JFK books by the American Booksellers Association's "Book Sense" program, an annual holiday choice by USA Today, and also a selection of the Book of the Month Club, the History Book Club, with the unabridged audiotape version winning the Earphone Award from Audiofile magazine. Warner Bros. Home Video also produced it as a 2008 documentary. In addition to his non-fiction work, Maier also authored the 2024 book, MONTAUK TO MANHATTAN: An American Novel, a satirical murder mystery fiction involving today’s streaming TV, #MeToo Hollywood, the rise of Donald Trump, Hamptons parties, the stealing of Native American lands, and a well-known New York newspaper. For many years, Maier worked as an investigative reporter for Newsday – producing some of the largest projects in the paper’s history – after previously serving as a reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times. Maier twice won the national Society of Professional Journalists prize for investigative reports – about local police corruption in murder cases as well as the international trade in human body parts. He also won the top Daniel Pearl Award from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists based on his series about immigrant workplace deaths for which Maier testified before the U.S. Senate. In 2010, his print/television documentary about the victims of the “Bravo” hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific won the National Headliners Award and prompted a Congressional hearing. His documentary about Keith Bush, one of the long-running “innocent man” murder cases in U.S. history, won a 2020 New York Emmy award and helped Bush gain his exoneration. In 2022, Maier received the Columbia University Journalism School Alumni Award for career achievement.