Thomas L. Friedman
American journalist and author
Thomas Loren Friedman ( FREED-mən; born July 20, 1953) is an American political commentator and author. He is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a weekly columnist for The New York Times. He has written extensively on foreign affairs, global trade, the Middle East, globalization, and environmental issues.
Friedman began his career as a reporter and won two Pulitzer Prizes in the 1980s for his coverage on conflict in Lebanon and politics in Israel, followed by a further prize in 2002 for commentary on the war on terror.
Early life and education
Friedman was born on July 20, 1953, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of Margaret and Harold Friedman. Harold, who was vice president of a ball bearing company, United Bearing, died of a heart attack in 1973 when Tom was nineteen years old. Margaret, who served in the United States Navy during World War II and studied Home Economics at the University of Wisconsin, was a homemaker and a part-time bookkeeper. Margaret was also a Silver Life Master duplicate bridge player, who died in 2008. Friedman has two older sisters, Shelley and Jane. From an early age, Friedman, whose father often took him to the golf course for a round after work, wanted to be a professional golfer.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Thomas L. Friedman” as american journalist and author. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american journalist and author. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q310950. VIAF identifies the subject as 110855387. The Library of Congress control number is n84028119. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1953, 2002, 1973 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas L. Friedman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.