About Ben Yagoda
I was born in New Rochelle, New York; attended New Rochelle High School and Horace Mann School; and graduated from Yale University with a degree in English. I took classes from such eminent teachers as Harold Bloom, David Milch, Marjorie Garber, Richard Sewell, Theodore Solotaroff, Richard Brodhead, Stanley Elkin, R.W.B. Lewis, William Ferris, Alvin Kernan, Thomas Bergin, and David Brion Davis. Truly, giants strode the earth.
My first job was as an editor at The New Leader, the venerable once-Socialist biweekly. I left in 1978 to be a fulltime freelance writer, and for the next fourteen years I alternated jobs (as an editor/writer at New Jersey Monthly and Philadelphia Magazine and a movie critic at the Philadelphia Daily News) with stints as a freelancer. Along the way, I've written for the American Scholar, Boulevard, the Columbia Journalism Review, Dissent, Esquire, and, in fact, magazines that start with every letter of the alphabet except K, Q, X and Z.
In 1992, I started teaching journalism in the English Department at the University of Delaware. I'm currently a professor of English there and in 2007 helped inaugurate a journalism minor at UD. I spend most of my writing time on books, which you can read about elsewhere on this website. In a 2005 essay for Slate, I publicly declared that I would no longer write magazine articles--but I still occasionally contribute essays and reviews for Slate, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times Book Review, Stop Smiling, and other publications. Currently I'm working on a book on the history of memoir and autobiography. I am represented by the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency.
I live in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, with my wife, Gigi Simeone, and--when they are at home--our two daughters, Elizabeth Yagoda and Maria Yagoda.