Born and raised in Nebraska, Kurt Andersen lives in New York City and rural Connecticut. His fifth novel, The Breakup, will be published in the U.S. in August.

His most recent books are Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, A Recent History, a companion volume to Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, A 500-Year History, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He’s also the author of the acclaimed bestselling novels You Can’t Spell America Without Me, True Believers, Heyday, and Turn of the Century. He appears regularly as a commentator on MSNOW, and contributes to The Atlantic and New York Times. He co-created and hosted the weekly public radio program Studio 360 for twenty years, co-founded Spy magazine, edited New York, and was a columnist and critic for The New Yorker and Time.

Books

Evil Geniuses (2020) is “a work of towering importance,” according to Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times Book Review,  and an “essential, absorbing book.”  Historian Walter Isaacson called it “the one book everyone must read as we figure out how to rebuild our country. A triumph.”

Fantasyland (2017), according to MSNOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell, was “the most important book that I have read this year, a stunning, sweeping explanation of how we got to Trump.” “The book is not addressed to an academic audience,” wrote historian Robert Darnton in The New York Review of Books, “and so much the better. It is written with gusto; it is very funny; and it succeeds in ridiculing hogwash, past and present. Andersen writes as a modern Mencken: no sympathy for religious claptrap, no holds barred in combatting political piffle.”

​You Can’t Spell America Without Me (2017) is a comic novel, a fictional memoir of Donald Trump’s first year in office that Ron Charles in The Washington Post said “rises to that yuuuge challenge…the perfect author for this lavish parody.” “It’s hilarious.” wrote The Sunday Times of London’s critic. Created in collaboration with Alec Baldwin.

“Kurt Andersen’s True Believers could be included in same class as Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” wroteJeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. “One difference: There’s more action in Andersen’s book than in Roth’s.”  According to USA Today it is “emotionally accurate” and “profound,” and in Vanity Fair Jon Robin Baitz called it “a great American novel.” It was included on the best-novels-of-2012 lists of the San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Post.

The Los Angeles Times called Heyday (2007)  “a major work.” The Houston Chronicle (and nine other newspapers) said it “deserves instant acceptance into the ranks of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, and Gore Vidal’s Lincoln.” It won the Langum Prize as the best American historical novel of the year, and was  a New York Times bestseller,

The New York Times called Turn of the Century (1999) “wickedly satirical” and “outrageously funny” and named it a Notable Book of the year, while The Wall Street Journal said it was “savagely subversive” and “a smart, funny and excruciatingly deft portrait of our age.” Publishers Weekly called it  “a blockbuster fiction debut for Andersen” and “brilliantly conceived, keenly incisive social satire that draws fresh humor out of millennial madness” — and in 2016 named it one of the ten best long novels ever.

Magazines & Media

He co-founded the transformative satirical magazine Spy and was its editor for seven years. In  the New York Times recently, media critic Jack Shaferwrote that Spy was one of “a handful of 20th-century American magazines whose glory days continue to influence editors,” and that “Spy didn’t capture the zeitgeist — it was the zeitgeist.” Author Christopher Buckley in the Times called it “deliciously vicious” and “despised by all the right people, primus inter pares, Donald Trump.” And author Dave Eggers said “it’s pretty safe to say that Spy was the most influential magazine” of its era. “It was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all. There’s no magazine that’s so continually referenced, held up as a benchmark; and whose demise is so lamented.”After Spy, Andersen became editor-in-chief of New York; in 2000 co-founded Inside, the first online publication covering the media and entertainment industries; oversaw a relaunch of Colors magazine; and co-founded the daily online newsletter Very Short List.

Podcasts & Audio

He was the co-creator and host of Studio 360, the cultural magazine show and podcast that ran from  from 2000 to 2020. It was heard by almost 1 million listeners each week on 250 public radio stations and  by podcast. The program  won two Peabody Awards

In 2021 he  wrote and narrated the seven-episode podcast Nixon At War.  Historian and Nixon biographer Evan Thomas said it was “the smartest and clearest (and most entertaining) explanation of this tangled mess I have heard.” Political journalist John Heileman called it “the best kind of history, stunningly good – magisterial, extraordinary, delightful, entertaining, fantastic, darkly comic, brilliant, astonishing, and incredibly gratifying.”

TV, Film, Theater

In 2022 he co-created and co-wrote with Steven Soderbergh Command Z, a 90-minute 7-episode sci-fi comedy series starring Michael Cera, Liev Schrieber and Roy Woods Jr.  IndieWire called it  “a playful and hilarious satire that is deadly serious." "Soderbergh and Andersen's Command Z,” and according to The Daily Beast “is a funny and pointed web series about wormholes, paradoxes, and transformative action.”

In 2021 he wrote the 10-episode second season of The World According to Jeff Goldblum on Disney+. For USA Networks/Universal he co-created the cable TV channel Trio. He was executive producer and head writer of two prime-time specials for NBC, How to Be Famous and Hit List, starring Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. He has co-written feature film screenplays as well as TV pilots for ABC, NBC, HBO, and Amazon. 

He is a co-author of Loose Lips, a satirical off-Broadway “verbatim theater” piece starring Bebe Neuwirth, Harry Shearer and Andy Richter that had long runs in New York and Los Angeles. The play will have a New York revival in 2026.

Andersen graduated from Harvard College. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Rhode Island School of Design and Pratt Institute, and taught at both the Art Center College of Design (as Visionary in Residence) and the School of Visual Arts.