Michael Lesy (born 1945) is an American non-fiction writer.^[1] His books, which combine historical photographs with original writing, include Wisconsin Death Trip (1973), Real Life: Louisville in the Twenties (1976), Bearing Witness: A Photographic Chronicle of American Life (1982), Visible Light (1985), Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties (2007), Repast: Dining Out at the Dawn of the New American Century (with Lisa Stoffer, 2013), Looking Backward: A Photographic Portrait of the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (2017), and Snapshots 1971–77 (September 2021).^[2]

Lesy grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio.^[3] He received a B.A. in theoretical sociology from Columbia University, an M.A. in American social history from the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. in American cultural history from Rutgers University.^[4] He taught at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, from 1990 to 2020, and is a Hampshire emeritus professor of literary journalism.^[4]

Wisconsin Death Trip, Lesy's first book, was adapted into a film by James Marsh in 1999.^[5][6] Ironically, Lesy explained in a 2003 interview, "I wanted to make it a movie. But it cost too much to produce. So it was just a poor man’s way of making a movie in book form."^[3] Wisconsin Death Trip was presented on the BBC documentary series Arena in 2000.^[7]

In 2006 the United States Artists Foundation named Lesy its first Simon Fellow.^[8] In 2013 Lesy was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Photography Studies.^[9]