The book grew out of Murphy's August 1993 Atlantic cover story, 'Women and the Bible.' More recent works include Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America and Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe. The Word According to Eve: Women and The Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own, was published in 1998 by Houghton Mifflin. In a feature about the book's success The New York Times reported that the article “was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 1990 and became a runaway hit for The Atlantic Monthly, which eventually ran off 150,000 copies of it.” Murphy's second book, Just Curious, a collection of his essays that first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's, was published in 1995.

Murphy's book Rubbish!(1992), which he co-authored with William Rathje, grew out of an article that was written by Rathje, edited by Murphy, and published in the December, 1989, issue of The Atlantic Monthly. He has written frequently for the magazine on a great variety of subjects, from religion to language to social science to such out-of-the-way matters as ventriloquism and his mother's method for pre-packaging lunches for her seven school-aged children.

Murphy served as The Atlantic Monthly's managing editor from 1985 until 2005, when the magazine relocated to Washington. Says Cullen Murphy, “At The Atlantic we try to provide a considered look at all aspects of our national life to write, as well, about matters that are not strictly American to emphasize the big story that lurks, untold, behind the smaller ones that do get told and to share the conclusions of our writers with people who count.”

The American Crisis by Cullen Murphy