Evan Friss

Evan Friss is a professor of history at James Madison University whose teaching and research focus on U.S., urban, and public history. He earned his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and has taught at James Madison University for more than a decade. Friss is a New York Times bestselling author of The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (Viking, 2024), a narrative history of American bookstores that draws on archival collections, oral histories, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with booksellers.

In addition to The Bookshop, Friss has written extensively on the history of cycling and urban space. He is the author of The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s and On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City. His work frequently explores how everyday practices and built environments shape urban life, and he lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, with his wife, a bookseller, and their two children.