Carol Loomis

Carol Loomis is a legendary American business journalist who spent over fifty years at Fortune magazine and whose collection Tap Dancing to Work gathers the definitive journalism on Warren Buffett across five decades.

Carol Loomis joined Fortune magazine in 1954, became its first female staff writer, and spent the next fifty years producing some of the most important business journalism written in America. She is known for two things above all: her editorial relationship with Warren Buffett and the quality of her own writing. She has edited Buffett’s annual shareholder letters for decades; he has said she is the first person to read them.

Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2012 (2012) collects Loomis’s own Fortune articles about Buffett alongside other Fortune coverage of his work, assembled to create a comprehensive portrait of his thinking and his methods across five decades. The title comes from Buffett’s own description of how he feels about going to work. The collection is not a biography but something more useful for investors: a chronological record of how the world’s most successful investor has thought about markets, businesses, value, and risk across different economic conditions.

Loomis’s own writing demonstrates the qualities that made her one of the most respected business journalists of her generation: the ability to explain complex financial structures without oversimplifying, the willingness to be critical of institutions and executives that other journalists treated deferentially, and a prose clarity that made the subject matter accessible without making it seem simpler than it was. She retired from Fortune in 2014 after sixty years.