Fantasyland (Andersen) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—August 22, 1954
• Where—Omaha, Nebraska, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Awards—Langum Prize-Historical Fiction
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, New York


Kurt Andersen is an American novelist who is also host of the Peabody-winning public radio program Studio 360, a co-production between Public Radio International and WNYC. Andersen was born in Omaha, Nebraska where he attended high school. Later, he graduated, magna cum laude, from Harvard where he edited the Harvard Lampoon.

Journalism
In 1986 he co-founded Spy magazine with E. Graydon Carter, which was sold in 1991; it continued publishing until 1998. He has been a writer and columnist for New York ("The Imperial City"), The New Yorker ("The Culture Industry"), and Time ("Spectator"). He was also the architecture and design critic for Time for nine years.

Andersen was fired in 1996 from New York magazine, where he was an editor-in-chief, a position he occupied for two-and-a-half years. The ostensible reason was the publication's financial results, but Andersen attributed the firing to his refusal to kill a story regarding the rivalry between investment bankers Felix Rohatyn and Steven Rattner. The story had upset Henry Kravis, one of the magazine's owners.

In 1999 Anderson co-founded an online media news web site and biweekly magazine called Inside, which he and his co-founders sold to Primedia; Primedia closed the site in October 2001. From 2001 to 2004 he served as a senior creative consultant to Barry Diller's Universal Television, and from 2003 to 2005 as editorial director of Colors magazine. More recently, he co-founded the email cultural curation service Very Short List, was a guest op-ed columnist for The New York Times and editor-at-large for Random House.

Books
Andersen is the author of three novels, including Turn of the Century (1999), which was a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book of the year, and the bestseller Heyday (2007), which won the Langum Prize for the best American historical fiction of 2007. He published his third novel, True Believers (2012). His short fiction was published in the anthology, Stories: All-New Tales (2010).

Andersen has also published a book of humorous essays, The Real Thing (1980, 1982, and 2008), about "quintessentialism." He co-authored two humor books — Tools of Power (1980), a parody of self-help books on becoming successful, and Loose Lips (1995), an anthology of edited transcripts of real-life conversations involving celebrated people. Along with Graydon Carter and George Kalogerakis he assembled a history and greatest-hits anthology of Spy called Spy: The Funny Years (2006).

He also wrote Reset (2009), about the causes and aftermath of the Great Recession, and he has contributed to a number of other books. His bestselling cultural history, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History (2017), attempts to explain American society's peculiar susceptibility to illusions.

Personal life
Andersen lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, the author Anne Kreamer, and their two daughters. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/3/2017.)