Goodwin is the author of No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front During World War II (1993), which was awarded the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in history, the Harold Washington Literary Award and the Washington Monthly Book Award. She appeared prominently as a commentator in the Ken Burns PBS documentary on baseball.

Her other books include the award-winning The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987), made into a six-hour television mini-series, and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976), called “the most penetrating political biography” The New York Times reviewer had ever read.

Goodwin received a bachelor’s degree from Colby College and a doctoral degree in government from Harvard University where she was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow.

Goodwin taught for 10 years as a professor of government at Harvard University. An assistant to President Lyndon Johnson during his last year in the White House, she later assisted him in the preparation of his memoirs.

The author of articles on politics and baseball for numerous national publications, she makes the claim that she was the first woman journalist to enter the Red Sox locker room.

Goodwin is a regular commentator on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer and appears regularly on Nightline as well as various morning news shows.

Goodwin will deliver the Bates lecture as a memorial to Jean Byers Sampson, a noted Lewiston citizen active in the fields of education, civil liberties and civil rights, who passed away several months ago. Sampson is the late wife of Richard W. Sampson, a member of the Bates faculty from 1952 until his retirement as professor of mathematics in 1990.