Susan Cain

Susan Cain was born in 1968 and grew up in Lawrence, New York, the youngest of three children in a family that included a rabbi grandfather and a physician father. She earned a bachelor's degree in English from Princeton in 1989 and a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1993, then spent seven years as a corporate attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in New York before running her own negotiations consulting practice for several more years.

That legal career, which she has described as feeling like "time spent in a foreign country," gave Cain a firsthand, uncomfortable education in how workplaces built around extroverted norms — constant meetings, open-plan offices, reward for the loudest voice in the room — can sideline quieter people who are just as capable. She spent roughly seven years researching and writing Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, published in 2012.

Quiet became a New York Times bestseller and has sold several million copies worldwide; Cain's companion TED talk is one of the most-viewed in the platform's history. In 2015 she co-founded Quiet Revolution, an organization applying the book's ideas to workplace, school, and parenting training programs. She has since written a young-readers edition of Quiet and a companion self-assessment journal, then shifted focus with Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole (2022), an Oprah's Book Club selection that moved from introversion specifically into the broader emotional territory of sorrow and longing.