Ron Rosenbaum was born in Manhattan and grew up in Bay Shore, Long Island, New York. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, in English Literature, specializing in the 17th-century metaphysical poets, and went on to study English literature on a Carnegie Fellowship at Yale Graduate School before leaving to take up writing full time.
He began at the Village Voice and Esquire at the end of their respective Golden Ages. (He did not personally cause the end.) He went on to write for Harper’s, New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Vanity Fair, among many other periodicals. His non fiction has been collected in four separate volumes, most recently The Secret Parts of Fortune, and more of his past work can be found on the long form site, Byliner.com.
He wrote “The Edgy Enthusiast” cultural affairs column for the New York Observer for twelve years. Among his proudest achievements was writing columns that got the four out-of-print novels by Charles Portis (including The Dog of the South) back into print. And helping to save the last unfinished manuscript of Vladimir Nabokov from burning.
His most recent books include The Shakespeare Wars (about genuine scholarly controversies, not the foolish “authorship” question); and How the End Begins (about the continued peril of nuclear war). He also edited a collection of essays about contemporary anti-Semitism, Those Who Forget the Past. He has taught writing seminars at Columbia Journalism School, NYU, and the University of Chicago.
Currently a cultural columnist for Slate.com, he is also the National Correspondent for Smithsonian Magazine, serves on the editorial board of Lapham’s Quarterly and the Publications Advisory Board of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He lives in Manhattan.