Bob Meyers — Was It Really William?

Who really wrote as "William Shakespeare"? Journalist Bob Meyers examines the problems with the traditional story.

This talk was presented on October 20, 2019, at the SOF Annual Conference at the Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford, Connecticut.

Bob Meyers served 19 years as president of the National Press Foundation, and two years as director of its Washington Journalism Center, retiring in 2014. In 1989-93 he directed the Harvard Journalism Fellowship for Advanced Studies in Public Health. Bob is a former reporter for the Washington Post and former editor at the San Diego Union. As a stringer for the Post he worked on the Watergate investigation from Los Angeles, focusing on the “dirty tricks” campaign that was a part of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize winning coverage. As a Post staffer he was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize himself. He has written two books, "Like Normal People" and "D.E.S.: The Bitter Pill." "Like Normal People" is the story of his mentally handicapped younger brother and the family’s efforts to help him lead a normal life. It was made into a TV movie in 1979 and nominated for a National Book Award. "D.E.S.: The Bitter Pill" is the story of a widely used anti-miscarriage drug that had enormous social and medical consequences. It received the Award for Excellence in Biomedical Writing from the American Medical Writers Association.

Educated in the New York City public school system and at UCLA, Meyers was awarded an academic fellowship at Harvard’s Center for Health Communication in 1987-88. He is a member of the Fellowship Advisory Board of the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism. He has lectured at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Tsinghua University in Beijing, and in Jamaica, Lithuania, Poland and Estonia, among other places.

For more on the Shakespeare Authorship Question, visit shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org.