Peter Richmond

Peter Richmond attended The Choate School and Yale University, where he studied under the late, great John Hersey and the very alive, great David Milch. Somewhere in there he also attended auto mechanics school, from which he never graduated. He was awarded a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard, where he studied art, architecture and paleontology. Recently, he taught English, history and drama at Indian Mountain School, in Lakeville Connecticut. As a result of all of these academic experiences, he is curious about everything, and knows a little bit about a lot of things, but not a whole lot about anything. He has also hitchhiked across the country a couple of times, driven across it countless times, and ridden all of Amtrak’s trains. These travels instilled in a him a fascination with, and a love of, the people, towns, villages, cities, bridges, train stations, rivers, forests, fields and meadows of America. He hopes that this fascination has found its way into his writing. Four significant career facts: 1) One of his stories was judged to be the second-best bowling story of the year 1991. 2) He has tried to work trains into everything he has ever written, usually without success. 3) In writing a book with Muhammad Ali which has never been published, he took Ali to a McDonald’s where they both ate French fries and drank strawberry milk shakes. 4) He interviewed George Clooney one afternoon, and then spent the evening at a party at Bob Hope’s house with George’s aunt, the late, great singer Rosemary Clooney. 5) He spent a morning with Paul Newman in his New York City apartment, whose kitchen featured two rinsed Budweiser cans in the dish-drying rack. His work has appeared in several periodicals, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Parade, GQ, Details, Architecture, Parade, Golf Digest, Travel + Leisure Golf and TV Guide, as well as two amazing magazines which, sadly, no longer exist: Play and New England Monthly. His journalism has been included in a dozen different anthologies, including Best American Sportswriting of the Twentieth Century. He has interviewed hundreds of celebrities, athletes and notable people, but has discovered that the guy you end up sitting next to at the bar in a Ruby Tuesday’s just off the interstate, next to the Marriott Courtyard, is usually every bit as fascinating as the famous people, although Paul Newman would prove the exception there. But come to think of it, Newman was exactly the kind of guy who’d want to watch a football game at a franchise restaurant bar off the interstate. So. He has published four books, and is currently working on two others. He lives in the really wonderful village of Millerton, New York, in Dutchess County, with his wife, writer and wine purveyor Melissa Davis.