Photo: Marco Giugliarelli
Kurt Andersen is a writer. He spent his first 20 years in Nebraska, and most of the rest since then in New York City. His latest project was COMMAND Z, a sci-fi political comedy he co-created and co-wrote with Steven Soderbergh, and his most recent book is Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, a companion volume to Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He’s also the author of the critically acclaimed, bestselling novels True Believers, Heyday, Turn of the Century, and You Can’t Spell America Without Me.
"Steven Soderbergh and Kurt Andersen's 'Command Z'," according to The Daily Beast, "is a funny and pointed web series about wormholes, paradoxes, and the need to take small steps to bring about transformative action," and IndieWire called the 90-minute show "a playful and hilarious satire that is deadly serious in reckoning with mankind's most self-destructive tendencies."
Evil Geniuses is "a work of towering importance," according to Anand Giridharadas, who on the front page of the New York Times Book Review also called it an "essential, absorbing book" in which Andersen "carefully, meticulously, overwhelmingly, argues through facts" but "never loses the texture of actual human beings. He is a graceful, authoritative guide, and he has a Writer-with-a-capital-W’s ability to defamiliarize the known." Fantasyland (2017), according to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, was “most important book that I have read this year," and Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics) said it “presents the very best kind of idea—one that, in retrospect, seems obvious, but that took a seer like Kurt Andersen to piece together,” with “thinking and writing [that] are dazzling, an absolute joy to read and will leave your brain dancing with excitement.” It won the Forkosch Award for the best humanist book of the year.
True Believers appeared on the best-novels-of-the-year lists of the San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Post. Booklist called it “an ambitious and remarkable novel” of “spellbinding suspense.” According to other reviewers it is “the best reverie on the 1960s and their legacy” (Fortune), “emotionally accurate” and “profound” (USA Today), and “a great American novel” (Vanity Fair).
Heyday was aTimes bestseller that the Los Angeles Times called “a major work.” The Times Book Review said there is “something moving in the energy of its amazement.” And the Houston Chronicle (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 included on several best-books-of-the-year lists, and won the Langum Prize as the best American historical novel of the year.
The New York Times called Turn of the Century “wickedly satirical” and “outrageously funny” and named it a Notable Book 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, and Publishers Weekly called it one of the ten best long novels ever.
He was the host and co-creator of Studio 360, the cultural magazine show produced by Public Radio International and PRX from 2000 to 2020. It was broadcast on 250 stations and distributed by podcast to almost 1 million listeners each week. Andersen was honored twice by New York State Associated Press for the best radio interview of the year, and the program, which a New York Times critic called "the best program on radio," won two Peabody Awards.
He also wrote, co-produced and narrated the seven-episode podcast Nixon At War, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and released by PRX in 2021. Nixon biographer Evan Thomas says it's "the smartest and clearest (and most entertaining) explanation of this tangled mess that I have heard." Author and broadcaster John Heileman calls it "the best kind of history. Stunningly good. Magisterial, extraordinary, delightful, entertaining, fantastic, darkly comic, brilliant. Astonishing and incredibly gratifying." And political journalist and author Jonathan Alter wrote that it "is one of the best podcasts I’ve ever heard, full of amazing Nixon tapes and great analysis of how his paranoia over Vietnam was at the root of Watergate."
He has also written for film, television and the stage. 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. He has written screenplays for Walt Disney and Village Roadshow Pictures, and pilots for ABC, NBC, HBO and Amazon. He was co-author of Loose Lips, a satirical off-Broadway revue that had long runs in New York and Los Angeles starring Bebe Neuwirth, Harry Shearer and Andy Richter.
He regularly appears as a commentator on MSNBC, and has delivered TED talks. He served as a summer guest Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, and still contributes regularly to the Times. He has also been also a regular columnist and critic for New York, The New Yorker and TIME.
As an editor, Kurt co-founded the transformative satirical magazine Spy and served as editor-in-chief of New York. He also co-founded Inside, a digital and print publication covering the media and entertainment industries, oversaw a relaunch of Colors magazine, co-founded the online newsletter Very Short List, and served as editor-at-large for Random House. In the early 2000s for USA Networks/Universal he co-created the cable TV channel Trio
He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Rhode Island School of Design and Pratt Institute, and taught at the Art Center College of Design (where he was Visionary in Residence) and the School of Visual Arts. He lives in New York City with his wife Anne Kreamer.