Walter Kirn

Walter Kirn was born on August 3, 1962, in Akron, Ohio, and was raised on a farm in Minnesota.⁠[1]

He graduated from Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry in 1983 and from the University of OxfordUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry in 1985. As a Princeton undergraduate he gravitated toward poetry, switching to fiction after encouragement from an editor at Alfred A. Knopf.⁠[1]

From 1985 to 1986 Kirn worked as a journalist and editor at Vanity Fair in New York under then-editor Tina Brown; from 1986 to 1993 he was the BBCBBCThe BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) is the United Kingdom’s public broadcaster. Its predecessor was the British Broadcasting Company, formed in 1922, and since 1927 it has been established under a Royal Charter. It provides television, radio, and online services in the UK, is funded mainly by the television licence fee, and broadcasts worldwide in multiple languages through BBC World Service.Open the full entry’s American cultural correspondent; and from 1989 to 1990 he was a journalist and editor at Spy.⁠[1][2]

In 1990 Knopf published Kirn’s short story collection My Hard Bargain, and in 1992 Pocket Books published his novel She Needed Me.⁠[1]

In 1999 he published the novel Thumbsucker, a coming-of-age story about Justin Cobb, a teenager with a thumb-sucking habit.⁠[2][1]

Kirn recalled that in the summer of 1998 a New York man calling himself Clark Rockefeller sought to adopt a partly paralyzed Gordon setter through the local Humane Society, and Kirn drove the dog 2,000 miles from Montana to New York in his pickup, which began their acquaintance.⁠[3]

In 2008 the man took his daughter during a custody hearing in Boston, prompting a nationwide Amber alert; after his capture he was identified as Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German national wanted in a 1985 murder in California, and he was later convicted of murder.⁠[3]

In 2014 Kirn published Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, an account of the relationship. “I wanted to show the point of view of the dupe, of the fool,” he said.⁠[3]

In 2001 Doubleday published Kirn’s novel Up in the Air, whose protagonist, Ryan Bingham, is a “Career Transition Counselor” who fires people for a living, spends most of his time flying and is close to his goal of one million frequent-flyer miles.⁠[1][4]

In 2005 Doubleday published Kirn’s novel Mission to America, about young members of a fictional sect from a remote Montana town who are sent out on a mission to find new converts.⁠[1][5]

The same year Thumbsucker, a film adaptation of his novel directed by Mike Mills and released by Sony Pictures Classics, opened in theaters, with a cast including Keanu Reeves, Vince Vaughn and Tilda Swinton.⁠[1][2][5]

Kirn’s novel The Unbinding was first serialized on SlateSlate AutoSlate Auto is a U.S. electric vehicle company established in 2022 that is developing a customizable all-electric pickup with a starting price of $24,950, to be assembled in Indiana.Open the full entry and published in book form by Anchor Books in 2007. It follows Kent Selkirk, an operator at the always-on subscriber service AidSat, who uses the company’s information to pursue his neighbor Sabrina while he himself is being watched.⁠[2]

In the fall of 2008 Kirn was the Robert Vare Nonfiction Writer-in-Residence at the University of Chicago, teaching the course “The Art of Nonfiction”; he had previously taught nonfiction writing at the University of Montana.⁠[6]

His memoir of his years at Princeton and Oxford, Lost in the Meritocracy, first appeared in The Atlantic and was published as a book by Doubleday in 2009; it was named a New York Times Notable Book.⁠[6][7]

In 2009 Up in the Air, directed by Jason Reitman and starring George Clooney and Anna Kendrick, was released as an adaptation of Kirn’s novel. The film received six Academy Award nominations, including best picture, and grossed $166 million worldwide.⁠[6][2][8]

In 2023 Kirn and David Samuels created County Highway, whose first issue was dated July–August 2023. Published as a 20-page broadsheet in the form of a 19th-century newspaper, it carries reporting about America, columns, essays on literature and art, and a music section. Samuels is editor, Kirn is editor-at-large and Donald Rosenfeld is publisher.⁠[9][10]

In their editors’ note the two wrote that the paper was born during the Covid lockdowns and asked readers to think of it as “a kind of hand-made alternative to the undifferentiated blob of electronic ‘content.’”⁠[10]

Kirn co-hosts the podcast America This Week with Matt Taibbi on Racket News; the January 10, 2025 episode discussed the Los Angeles fires and what the hosts called America’s competency crisis.⁠[11]

Kirn has been a contributing editor at Time and literary editor of GQ, and has written book criticism for New York magazine and The New York Times; his articles and essays have also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and Esquire.⁠[6][1]

He also publishes the Substack newsletter Unbound.⁠[12]

County Highway: Official website: https://www.countyhighway.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

Unbound: Official website: https://walterkirn.substack.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]