Kurt B. Andersen is an American writer, the author of novels and nonfiction, as well as a writer for television and the theater. His work frequently focuses on American sociopolitical history and satire, ranging from cultural analysis to near-future speculative fiction.
He was a co-founder of Spy magazine, as well as co-creator and host of the weekly Peabody Award-winning public radio program and podcast Studio 360.
Contents
Early life and education
Andersen was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Growing up, he lived across the street from Ginni Thomas. He graduated from Westside High School. While a student at Harvard College, he was an editor and vice-president of the Harvard Lampoon. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Rhode Island School of Design and Pratt Institute.
Journalism, broadcasting, and media
Early in his career, Andersen worked as a writer for the Today Show critic and interviewer Gene Shalit. Before and during his tenure at Spy, he wrote for Time, including nine years as its architecture and design critic.
In 1986, Andersen, with E. Graydon Carter and Thomas L. Phillips Jr., co-founded Spy. In his introduction to the 2006 retrospective anthology Spy: The Funny Years, author Dave Eggers assessed the publication's benchmark cultural impact:
Spy was the most influential magazine of the 1980s. It might have remade New York's cultural landscape; it definitely changed the whole tone of magazine journalism. It was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all. There's no magazine I know of that's so continually referenced, held up as a benchmark; and whose demise is so lamented.
In 2006, novelist Christopher Buckley wrote that "Spy didn't capture the zeitgeist—it was the zeitgeist," that it was "deliciously vicious", and "despised by all the right people, primus inter pares, Donald Trump." In Spy, Andersen and Carter in 1988 coined the notable epithet "short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump" for the future U.S. president.
Media critic Jack Shafer wrote in 2009 that Spy was one of "a handful of 20th-century American magazines...whose glory days continue to influence editors." In a 2017 paper about Spy, Marist College journalism professor and department chair Kevin M. Lerner wrote that "a whole generation of journalists was raised with the Spy attitude ingrained not just into their writing but into their world view," and that "more than anything, Spy invented the painstakingly reported – but still funny – satirical magazine feature. It was as funny as Mad, and as well-reported as The New Yorker."
Andersen co-wrote and co-produced two hour-long prime-time Spy specials for NBC. The first, Spy Magazine Presents How to Be Famous (1991), was hosted by Jerry Seinfeld; the second, The Spy Magazine Hit List: The 100 Most Annoying and Alarming People and Events of 1992, was hosted by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Andersen and his partners sold Spy in 1991, and he departed the magazine in 1993; it continued publishing until its formal closure in 1998.
Literary works
Andersen is the author of five novels. His first was Turn of the Century (Random House, 1999), which was a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Heyday (Random House, 2007) was also a New York Times bestseller, and won the Langum Prize for the best American historical novel of 2007. True Believers (Random House, 2012) was named one of the best novels of that year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. His fourth novel, You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year As President (Penguin, 2017), is a fictional parody memoir "by" Donald Trump co-authored with Alec Baldwin, which also became a New York Times bestseller. Andersen's short fiction has appeared in anthologies such as Neil Gaiman's Stories: All-New Tales (HarperCollins, 2010).
Andersen's first book was a collection of humorous essays, The Real Thing (Doubleday, 1980; Holt, 1982; Bison Books, 2008), centered around the concept of "quintessentialism". He co-authored two humor books: Tools of Power (Viking, 1980), a parody of self-help books on becoming successful, and Loose Lips (Simon & Schuster, 1995), an anthology of edited transcripts of real-life conversations involving celebrated figures, based on an off-Broadway play of the same name he created with Lisa Birnbach and Jamie Malanowski. Along with Carter and George Kalogerakis, Andersen wrote and assembled a history and greatest-hits anthology of Spy called Spy: The Funny Years, published in 2006 by Miramax Books.
He also wrote Reset (Random House, 2009), an essay analyzing the causes and aftermath of the Great Recession. He has contributed to many other works, including Spark: How Creativity Works (HarperCollins, 2011), drawn entirely from his interviews for Studio 360; an introduction to Heinrich Böll's novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Penguin, 2010); and Fields of Vision: The Photographs of John Vachon (Library of Congress, 2010).
In 2017, he published Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History (Random House), which examines American society's historical susceptibility to falsehoods and illusions, tracing how this trait influenced Trump's election and the transformation of the Republican Party. Excerpts from Fantasyland appeared as a cover story in The Atlantic, and in Slate. Fantasyland, which the New York Times Book Review called "a great revisionist history of America," reached #3 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.
Personal life
Andersen lives in New York City and Cornwall, Connecticut with his wife, author Anne Kreamer. They have two daughters, Katherine Kreamer Andersen and Lucy Kreamer Andersen. At age 32, he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
Works
Fiction
Turn of the Century (Random House, 1999)
Heyday (Random House, 2007)
True Believers (Random House, 2012)
You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year As President (with Alec Baldwin) (Penguin, 2017)
The Breakup (Random House, (released August 18, 2026) ISBN 978-1-9848-0137-1
Nonfiction and humor
The Real Thing (Doubleday, 1980; Holt, 1982; Bison Books, 2008)
Tools of Power: The Elitist's Guide to the Ruthless Exploitation of Everybody and Everything (with Mark O'Donnell and Roger Parloff) (Viking, 1980)
Loose Lips: Real Words, Real People, Real Funny (with Jamie Malanowski and Lisa Birnbach) (Simon & Schuster, 1995)
Spy: The Funny Years (with George Kalogerakis and Graydon Carter) (Miramax Books, 2006)
Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America (Random House, 2009)
Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History (Random House, 2017) ISBN 978-1400067213
Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History (Random House, 2020)
Hasta La Vista America: Trump's Farewell Address (Pushkin Industries, 2021)
Essays, reporting, and other contributions
Andersen, Kurt, "You Say You Want a Devolution", Vanity Fair, January 2012 (examines the sociopolitical roots of populist movements such as the Occupy movement and the Tea Party)
Andersen, Kurt (March 2018). "How to talk Trump". Dispatches. Lexicon. The Atlantic. 321 (2): 27. Retrieved June 7, 2019.
Andersen, Kurt, "The Anti-vaccine Right Brought Human Sacrifice to America", The Atlantic, January 25, 2022
Andersen, Kurt, "‘Succession’ Nailed the Unreal Way We Live Now", The New York Times, May 29, 2023
Andersen, Kurt, "Bill Ackman Is a Brilliant Fictional Character", The Atlantic, January 18, 2024
Andersen, Kurt, "RFK Jr. Was My Drug Dealer", The Atlantic, August 23, 2024
