About David Hajdu

David Hajdu

David Hajdu is the music critic for The New Republic and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

He is the author of three books of narrative nonfiction and and one collection of essays: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996), Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (2001), The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008), and Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (2009). Both Lush Life and Positively 4th Street were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and Heroes and Villains was recently named a finalist for the NBCC for Criticism. Both Lush Life and Positively 4th Street also won the ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award. The Ten-Cent Plague was a finalist for the Eisner award, and the editors of Amazon named it the #1 Best Book of the Year on the arts. His books have also been finalists for the LAMBDA Literary Award and the Firecracker Book Award. As an editor and magazine writer, Hajdu has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award several times, and his articles and essays have appeared in Best Music Writing 2000, Best American Magazine Writing 2003, and OK You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors.

Hajdu was born and raised in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. First publication: Dave's News, made in the kitchen at age ten, 1965. First professional work: illustrations for The Easton Express, 1972. College: NYU. In 1979, he started writing for The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He was the founding editor of Video Review magazine (1980-1984), and later a top editor at Entertainment Weekly (1990-1999). In the late 1980s, he started teaching, at The New School. He has written for The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, BookForum, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, and other publications. He taught at the University of Chicago (as nonfiction writer in residence) and Syracuse University before Columbia.

Hajdu is the father of three — Jacob, Victoria, and Nathan Hajdu — and he is married to the singer and actor Karen Oberlin. He and his family live in Manhattan.

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