A native North Carolinian, Edwin M. Yoder Jr. was born in Greensboro in 1934. He was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in English and history and edited the student newspaper, and at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, earning bachelor's and master's degrees in philosophy, politics, and economics.
Yoder was acting editorial page editor of the Greensboro Daily News from 1960 to 1961, associate editor and editorial page editor of the Charlotte News from 1965 to 1975, and of the Washington Star from 1975 to 1981, where he won the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism in 1979. After the closure of the Star in 1981, he wrote a syndicated column for the Washington Post Writers Group which appeared in the Post and in some 75 newspapers in the United States and in Europe from 1982 to 1997. From 1991 to 2002, he was professor of journalism and humanities at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. There he taught courses in opinion writing and seminars in politics and recent English and European fiction.
Yoder has been published widely in various magazines, including Saturday Review, National Review, New Republic, Harper's Magazine, South Atlantic Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Sewanee Review, Diplomatic History, and Washington Post Book World, where his reviews have appeared regularly since 1969. His short story, "Blackmail," won the 2002 Andrew Lytle Memorial Award for the best short story published in the Sewanee Review. Yoder is the author of four books, including The Night of the Old South Ball and Joe Alsop's Cold War.
