Kurt Andersen ~ bio

KURT ANDERSEN is a writer.

He’s the author of the novels Heyday and Turn of the Century. Heyday was a New York Times bestseller that the Los Angeles Times called "a major work." The New York Times Book Review said there is "something moving, a stirring spirit, in the energy of its amazement." And the Chicago Sun-Times (and nine other papers) said it "deserves instant acceptance into the ranks [of] Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, [and] Gore Vidal's Lincoln." It was on several best-books-of-the-year lists. The New York Times called Turn of the Century "wickedly satirical" and "outrageously funny" and one of its Notable Books of the year, while The Wall Street Journal called it a "smart, funny and excruciatingly deft portrait of our age." It was a national bestseller.

He has also written for film, television and the stage. He adapted Turn of the Century as a screenplay for the director Curtis Hanson. During the 1990s he was executive producer and head writer of two prime-time specials for NBC, How to Be Famous and Hit List, starring Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and a creator of three pilots for ABC and NBC. He is co-author of Loose Lips, a satirical off-Broadway revue that had long runs in New York and Los Angeles starring Bebe Neuwirth, Peter Boyle, Harry Shearer and Andy Richter. And he has written Broomhilda, a musical comedy for the stage, with Martin Charnin.

He writes a column called "The Imperial City" for New York magazine, and contributes to Vanity Fair. He has previously been a columnist for The New Yorker ("The Culture Industry") and Time ("Spectator"). He began his career in journalism at Time, where during the 1980s he was an award-winning writer on politics and criminal justice before becoming, for eight years, the magazine’s architecture and design critic.

He is also host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award-winning cultural magazine show produced by Public Radio International and WNYC and broadcast on 140 stations to 500,000 listeners each week. From 2001 through 2004 he served as a creative consultant to Universal Television, helping to create the Trio cable channel and to shape Universal's TV programming.

As an editor, he co-founded the legendary Spy, which transformed journalism and became profitable after three years. He also served as editor-in-chief of New York magazine during the mid-90s, presiding over its editorial reinvigoration and record profitability. In 1999 he co-founded Inside, an online and print publication covering the media and entertainment industries, and in 2004 and 2005 he oversaw a relaunch of Colors magazine. In 2006 he co-founded Very Short List, an online service for cultural connoisseurs who would probably never call themselves "connoisseurs." And he is editor-at-large for Random House, responsible for finding, conceiving, and overseeing select non-fiction books.

At the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in 2004, he curated an exhibit called “Faster, Cheaper, Newer, More: Revolutions of 1848." He has since joined the board of trustees of the Cooper-Hewitt, and also serves on the board of the Pratt Institute. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he was an editor of the Lampoon. He received an honorary doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005, and in 2003, New York magazine named him one of the 100 People Who Changed New York. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Anne Kreamer, and his daughters Kate and Lucy.