David Sedaris
Author David Sedaris is known for his prickly, funny essays about his absurdist childhood in North Carolina and his absurdist adult life as a just-slightly-neurotic gay expatriate in Paris. His best-known piece may still be "SantaLand Diaries," an exasperated memoir of his temporary job as a Christmas elf at a Macy's department store. Sedaris was born in New York, grew up in North Carolina, and spent the 1980s as an aspiring writer. He and his sister, Amy Sedaris, later teamed up in New York under the ironical name of The Talent Family, writing plays like Incident at Cobbler's Knob and One Woman Shoe. He was asked to read parts of "SantaLand Diaries" on National Public Radio in 1992, and the gig made him a sudden radio star. That led to his first book, Barrel Fever, in 1994. By 2001, when Time magazine profiled him in a feature called "America's Best," his essays were appearing in The New Yorker and Esquire magazines and he had become a regular on the radio show This American Life. His other essay collections include Naked (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), and When You Are Engulfed In Flames (2008).
Extra credit: David and Amy Sedaris won a "special citation" Obie Award in 1995 for their play One Woman Shoe... Sedaris attended both Kent State and Duke University; he got a writing degree from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987... Me Talk Pretty One Day is a reference to his poor performance as a student of French... Sedaris has lived for many years in Paris with his partner, the theater director Hugh Hamrick... The New York Times reported in 2008 that Sedaris's books had sold over seven million copies.