As a correspondent for NBC News, appearing regularly on NBC Nightly News and the Today show, Burns was named one of the best writers in the history of broadcast journalism, joining such luminaries as Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Charles Kuralt and David Brinkley. He is also the winner of two Emmys for television news commentary. Burns’s first play, Mid-Strut, won the Eudora Welty Emerging Playwrights Competition in 2010. But it is as a historian that he truly excels. Two of his 15 books received the highest award given by the American Library Association, being named the "Best of the Best" in 2004 (The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol) and 2007 (The Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco). A later book, 1920: The Year That Made the Decade Roar, was one of the best non-fiction books of 2015, according to Kirkus Reviews. Several years ago, Eric Burns became intrigued with spiritualism and séances. 'When the Dead Talked … and the Smartest Minds in the World Listened' is the result of that curiosity. It’s well-researched, as he is wont to do, with the assistance of the Society for Psychical Research in London and the American Society for Psychical Research in New York, both founded in the 1870s. Burns lives in Connecticut, where he is at work on his first novel.