Peter Richardson

Peter Richardson has written critically acclaimed books about Hunter S. Thompson, the Grateful Dead, Ramparts magazine, and radical author and editor Carey McWilliams. He is currently completing a book about the first decade of Rolling Stone magazine.

Richardson's essays have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Guernica, California History, and many other outlets. Excerpts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Mother Jones, and Bookforum. A busy book reviewer, Richardson received the National Entertainment Journalism Award for Online Criticism in 2013.

From 2006 to 2023, Richardson taught courses on California culture at San Francisco Sta

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Timothy Denevi is the author of Freak Kingdom (2018), a biography of Hunter S. Thompson’s political career, and Hyper (2014), a memoir and cultural history of ADHD. His essays can be found online in The Atlantic, New York, Salon, Time, and Literary Hub, where he writes about politics.
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Michael Lewis

Michael Monroe Lewis is an American author and financial journalist. He has also been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009, writing mostly on business, finance, and economics. He is known for his nonfiction work, particularly his coverage of financial crises and behavioral finance.
Lewis was born in New Orleans and attended Princeton University, from which he graduated with a degree in art history. After attending the London School of Economics, he began a career on Wall Street during the 1980s as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers. The experience prompted him to write his first book, Liar's Poker (1989). Fourteen years later, Lewis wrote Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003), in which he investigated the success of
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Herman Melville

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Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a mer
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Jack Kerouac

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.

Of French-Canadian ancestry, Kerouac was raised in a French-speaking home in Lowell, Massachusetts. He "learned English at age six and spoke with a marked accent into his late teens." During World War II, he served in the United States Merchant Marine; he completed his first novel at the time, which was published more than 40 years after his death. His first published book was The Town and the City (1950), and he achieved widespread fame and notoriety with his second, On the Road, in 1957. It made him a beat icon, and he went on to publish 12 more novels and num
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Dennis McNally

Dennis McNally, author, historian, and longtime publicist for the Grateful Dead, was born into the singular world of the postwar military-industrial complex. The son of an Army counterintelligence officer and a determined mother who pursued a college degree even while battling terminal cancer, McNally’s early years were shaped by frequent relocations, both in the U.S. and abroad, and by a growing awareness of American culture and history. After an education that culminated in graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts, he broke with academic convention by choosing his dissertation topic early: the life and work of Jack Kerouac. His resulting biography, Desolate Angel, published in 1979, impressed Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Gar
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Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter Stockton Thompson (1937-2005) was an American journalist and author, famous for his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become the central figures of their stories. He is also known for his promotion and use of psychedelics and other mind-altering substances (and to a lesser extent, alcohol and firearms), his libertarian views, and his iconoclastic contempt for authority. He committed suicide in 2005.
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Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey was American writer, who gained world fame with his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962, filmed 1975). In the 1960s, Kesey became a counterculture hero and a guru of psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary. Kesey has been called the Pied Piper, who changed the beat generation into the hippie movement.

Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, CO, and brought up in Eugene, OR. He spent his early years hunting, fishing, swimming; he learned to box and wrestle, and he was a star football player. He studied at the University of Oregon, where he acted in college plays. On graduating he won a scholarship to Stanford University. Kesey soon dropped out, joined the counterculture movement, and began experimenting with drugs. In 1956 he married h
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David Browne

music journalist
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Charles Portis

Charles McColl Portis was an American author best known for his novels Norwood (1966) and the classic Western True Grit (1968), both adapted as films. The latter also inspired a film sequel and a made-for-TV movie sequel. A newer film adaptation of True Grit was released in 2010.

Portis served in the Marine Corps during the Korean war and attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He graduated with a degree in journalism in 1958.

His journalistic career included work at the Arkansas Gazette before he moved to New York to work for The New York Herald Tribune. After serving as the London bureau chief for the The New York Herald Tribune, he left journalism in 1964 and returned to Arkansas to write novels.

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Timothy Egan

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize winning author of nine books, including THE WORST HARD TIME, which won the National Book Award. His latest book, A PILGRIMAGE TO ETERNITY, is a personal story, a journey over an ancient trail, and a history of Christianity. He also writes a biweekly opinion column for The New York Times. HIs book on the photographer Edward Curtis, SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER, won the Carnegie Medal for best nonfiction. His Irish-American book, THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN, was a New York Times bestseller. A third-generation native of the Pacific Northwest, he lives in Seattle.
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Aldo Leopold

A Sand County Almanac , published posthumously in 1949, of American writer and naturalist Aldo Leopold celebrates the beauty of the world and advocates the conscious protection of wild places.

His effect on resource management and policy lasted in the early to mid-twentieth century, and since his death, his influence continued to expand. Through his observation, experience, and reflection at his river farm in Wisconsin, he honed the concepts of land health and a land ethic that since his death ever influenced in the years. Despite more than five hundred articles and three books during the course of his geographically widespread career, time at his shack and farm in Wisconsin inspired most of the disarmingly simple essays that so many per
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Jennifer Ackerman

Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about science and nature for three decades. She is the author of eight books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Genius of Birds, which has been translated into more than twenty languages. Her articles and essays have appeared in Scientific American, National Geographic, The New York Times, and many other publications. Ackerman is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Nonfiction, a Bunting Fellowship, and a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Her articles and essays have been included in several anthologies, among them Best American Science Writing, The Nature Reader, and Best Nature Writing.
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Phil Lesh

Philip Chapman Lesh was an American musician and a founding member of the Grateful Dead, with whom he developed a unique style of playing improvised six-string bass guitar. He was their bassist throughout their 30-year career.
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Joel Selvin

San Francisco Chronicle pop music critic Joel Selvin started covering rock shows for the paper shortly after the end of the Civil War. His writing has appeared in a surprising number of other publications that you would think should have known better.
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Jim Newton

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Newton also is the author of two critically acclaimed, best-selling biographies, "Justice for All: Earl Warren
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Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher (1968 – 2017) was a co-founder of Zero Books and Repeater Books. His blog, k-punk, defined critical writing for a generation. He wrote three books, Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie, and was a Visiting Fellow in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Gigi Georges

Gigi Georges turned to narrative non-fiction writing after an extensive career in politics, public service, and academia. A former White House Special Assistant to the President and U.S. Senate State Director, she has taught political science at Boston College, served as Program Director at the Harvard Kennedy School, and been a Managing Director of The Glover Park Group—a leading national public affairs firm. Her commentary and research-based articles have appeared in Time Magazine, the New York Times, Bloomberg.com, LitHub, Governing Magazine, M.I.T.’s Innovations Journal, and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Occasional Paper Series. She lives with her family in New Hampshire and Downeast Maine.
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Tom Wolfe

Wolfe was educated at Washington and Lee Universities and also at Yale, where he received a PhD in American studies.

Tom Wolfe spent his early days as a Washington Post beat reporter, where his free-association, onomatopoetic style would later become the trademark of New Journalism. In books such as The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe delves into the inner workings of the mind, writing about the unconscious decisions people make in their lives. His attention to eccentricities of human behavior and language and to questions of social status are considered unparalleled in the American literary canon.

He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Tom Wolfe is
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Voltaire

Complete works (1880) : https://archive.org/details/oeuvresco...

In 1694, Age of Enlightenment leader Francois-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, was born in Paris. Jesuit-educated, he began writing clever verses by the age of 12. He launched a lifelong, successful playwriting career in 1718, interrupted by imprisonment in the Bastille. Upon a second imprisonment, in which Francois adopted the pen name Voltaire, he was released after agreeing to move to London. There he wrote Lettres philosophiques (1733), which galvanized French reform. The book also satirized the religious teachings of Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal, including Pascal's famed "wager" on God. Voltaire wrote: "The interest I have in believing a thing is not a proof of the exi
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David McCullough

David McCullough was a Yale-educated, two-time recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize (Truman; John Adams) and the National Book Award (The Path Between the Seas; Mornings on Horseback). His many other highly-acclaimed works of historical non-fiction include The Greater Journey, 1776, Brave Companions, The Great Bridge, The Wright Brothers, and The Johnstown Flood. He was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the National Humanities Medal, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in addition to many other awards and honors. Mr. McCullough lived in Boston, Mass.
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Timothy Denevi

Timothy Denevi is the author of Freak Kingdom (2018), a biography of Hunter S. Thompson’s political career, and Hyper (2014), a memoir and cultural history of ADHD. His essays can be found online in The Atlantic, New York, Salon, Time, and Literary Hub, where he writes about politics.
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Jason De León

Jason De León is Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, with his lab located in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. De León is Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a long-term anthropological study of clandestine migration between Latin America and the United States that uses a combination of ethnographic, visual, archaeological, and forensic approaches to understand this violent social process while assisting families of missing migrants search for their loved ones. His academic work has been featured in numerous media outlets, including National Public Radio, the New York Times Magazine, Al Jazeera, The Huffington Post, and Vice. De Leó
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Merlin Sheldrake

Merlin is the author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. Merlin received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is a research associate of the Vrije University, Amsterdam, and sits on the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation and the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks.

Entangled Life is an international bestseller, winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021, and has been nominated for a host of other prizes, including the British Book Awards Book of the Year 2021 for Narrative Non-Fiction and the Rat
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