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With more than 1 million words of trenchant journalism under his byline and more citations in The Penguin Dictionary of Humorous Quotations than any living writer, P.J. O'Rourke has established himself as America's premier political satirist. He is the best-selling author of 12 books, including Parliament of Whores, Give War a Chance, Eat the Rich, The CEO of the Sofa, Holidays in Hell, Peace Kills and On the Wealth of Nations. Of his 2009 release, Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending, Celebrating America the Way It's Supposed To Be -- With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn, Publishers Weekly writes: "Never in neutral, O'Rourke offers laughter on wheels." Both TIME and The Wall Street Journal have labeled O'Rourke "the funniest writer in America."
Born in Toledo, Ohio, P.J. O'Rourke attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and graduate school at Johns Hopkins, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. After receiving an M.A. in English, he worked at small newspapers in Baltimore and New York.
In the early 1970s, he joined The National Lampoon where he became editor-in-chief and created (with Doug Kenney) the now classic "1964 High School Yearbook Parody." Concluding in the '80s that the real world was funnier than anything National Lampoon's writers could create, he became a foreign correspondent and since has covered crises and conflicts in more than 70 countries.
O'Rourke has written for such diverse publications as Car & Driver, PARADE, The Weekly Standard, House and Garden, Automobile, The American Spectator, Forbes FYI, The Atlantic Monthly and Rolling Stone, where he was the foreign-affairs desk chief for 15 years. He is the H.L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, and a frequent panelist on National Public Radio's game show "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me!"
Covering current events with the skill and discipline of an investigative reporter, O'Rourke adds a unique spin that has earned him a reputation as a modern-day Will Rogers. Known as a hard-bitten, cigar-smoking conservative, he, in fact, bashes all political persuasions. As he puts it, "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." Whether dealing with the inner workings of Washington bureaucracy or the shifting political and economic sands of the new world order, O'Rourke proves himself to be a savvy guide to national and world affairs. His razor sharp insights never fail to inform and entertain.
