Susan Orlean
Author · 17 books
I'm the product of a happy and uneventful childhood in the suburbs of Cleveland, followed by a happy and pretty eventful four years as a student at University of Michigan. From there, I wandered to the West Coast, landing in Portland, Oregon, where I managed (somehow) to get a job as a writer. This had been my dream, of course, but I had no experience and no credentials. What I did have, in spades, was an abiding passion for storytelling and sentence-making. I fell in love with the experience of writing, and I've never stopped. From Portland, I moved to Boston, where I wrote for the Phoenix and the Globe, and then to New York, where I began writing for magazines, and, in 1987, published my first piece in The New Yorker. I've been a staff writer there since 1992.
Books
The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup
My Encounters With Extraordinary People
2001
The Library Book
2018
The Floral Ghost
2016
Animalish
2011
The Orchid Thief
A True Story of Beauty and Obsession
1998
On Animals
2021
Joyride
A Memoir
2025
You Are Ready For Takeoff
A Short Trip
2021
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025
A Collection of the Year's Most Insightful Essays on the Natural World, Climate Change, and the Wonders of Science Curated by Susan Orlean
2025
Rin Tin Tin
The Life and the Legend
2011
Saturday Night
1990
My Kind of Place
Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere
2004
Lazy Little Loafers
2008
Homewrecker
Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere
2004
A Gentle Reign
2016
Red Sox and Bluefish and Other Things That Make New England New England
1987
The American Man at Age 10
2016
