Born and raised in Maryland, James Wolcott is a columnist for Vanity Fair and has written for The New Republic, The London Review of Books, Bookforum, and many other publications still treading water. He--I mean, I--also have a blog at the Vanity Fair website, where I keep tabs on politics, Project Runway, Mad Men, the dance scene, books, birding, and generally make a nuisance of myself, but in a fun, passionate, caring way. My wife Laura Jacobs is a novelist (her latest is The Bird Catcher), a dance critic, and Vanity Fair writer, and we live a wacky sitcom life in Manhattan with our two ocicats, Henry and Veronica, who deserve their own spinoff series. We also have a small bungalow on the Delaware Bay side of the Jersey Shore, where I sleep on the screened-in back porch and harbor any cricket who happens to pop in. My memoir about the Seventies in NYC, those years of punk and Pauline Kael, was published in 2011 by Doubleday. And in the autumn of 2013, Doubleday published my bulging nonfiction collection Critical Mass, which received (if I may be immodest) a rave in The New York Times.
I have published two bestselling Kindle Singles: The Gore Supremacy, about the life and strife of writer-provocateur Gore Vidal, and Wild in the Seats, a recreation of the tumultuous first performance of Stravinsky-Nijinsky-Diaghilev's The Rite of Spring on its 100th anniversary.
I can be followed on Twitter: twitter.com/JamesWolcott