Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Lewis Gaddis is best known for his scholarship on the Cold War and grand strategy, and has been called the "Dean of Cold War Historians" by The New York Times. His most widely taught work is Strategies of Containment, first published in 1982, which analyzes how successive American presidents employed containment doctrine against the Soviet Union.
John Lewis Gaddis won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for George F. Kennan: An American Life, his biography of the diplomat and historian George F. Kennan. The book also won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography and the 2012 American History Book Prize.
John Lewis Gaddis holds the Robert A. Lovett Professorship of Military and Naval History at Yale University, a position he has held since 1997. He previously taught at Ohio University from 1969, where he founded and directed the Contemporary History Institute.
John Lewis Gaddis argues that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's personality and historical role constituted one of the most important causes of the Cold War. He was originally associated with post-revisionism, which drew on newly available western government documents, but his focus on Stalin and perceived sympathy for American foreign policy led many historians to classify him as closer to the orthodox interpretation.
John Lewis Gaddis has received the 2006 Harry S. Truman Book Award for The Cold War, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, the Bancroft Prize in 1973, the National Humanities Medal in 2005, and Fulbright Scholarships to Finland in 1980 and to Poland in 1996, among other honors.
Reception was mixed. Historian Tony Judt described it as "a history of America's cold war: as seen from America, as experienced in America, and told in a way most agreeable to many American readers." Historian David S. Painter called it a "carefully crafted defense of US policy and policymakers" that was "not comprehensive." The book did win the 2006 Harry S. Truman Book Award.