Susan Orlean – Author Biography
Susan Orlean is an American journalist and bestselling author, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker known for her richly reported, quirkily humane long-form stories — including the books The Orchid Thief and The Library Book.
Early Life
Susan Orlean was born on October 31, 1955, in Cleveland, Ohio. She studied literature and history at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1976. She began her journalism career in Portland, Oregon, writing for alternative weeklies before moving east.
Career
Orlean wrote for Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire before joining The New Yorker in 1992, where her finely observed features — on subjects as varied as show dogs, taxidermy, and umbrella inventors — made her one of the magazine’s signature voices. Her book The Orchid Thief (1998), about an eccentric Florida plant poacher, was adapted by Charlie Kaufman into the Oscar-nominated film Adaptation (2002), with Meryl Streep playing Orlean herself. The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup (2001) collected her magazine pieces. Her later bestseller, The Library Book (2018), wove the story of the devastating 1986 Los Angeles Central Library fire into a love letter to libraries themselves. She has also written the memoir On Animals and children’s books.
Major Works
Her major works include The Orchid Thief (1998), The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup (2001), My Kind of Place (2004), Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend (2011), and The Library Book (2018).
Writing Style and Themes
Orlean’s genius is finding the universal in the obsessively specific: she takes marginal subcultures and overlooked institutions and reveals the whole of human nature inside them. Her style is warm, witty, and meticulously reported, with a novelist’s eye for character. Recurring themes include obsession and collecting, the hidden life of institutions, animals and the people who love them, and the quiet heroism of librarians, archivists, and other guardians of knowledge.
Legacy
Orlean is one of the defining practitioners of modern American long-form journalism — proof that no subject is too small for great writing. The Library Book sparked a renewed public appreciation for libraries, and Adaptation made her one of the rare journalists to become a character in an Oscar-nominated film about her own book.
