Henry Alford (writer)
Encyclopedia
Henry Alford is a humorist and journalist
who has contributed to Vanity Fair
and The New York Times
for over a decade. He has also written for The New Yorker
. The author of three books, he won a Thurber Prize for his second, Big Kiss, an account of his attempt to become a working actor. His book about manners, "Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?" will be published in January, 2012.
Sometimes called an "investigative humorist," he is primarily known for his first-person quests and exploits. These include creating a gourmet meal out of food purchased at a 99-Cent Store, walking the streets of New York City in his pajamas, inviting a restaurant health inspector to rate his apartment's kitchen while he was serving lunch to friends, and trying to pass the National Dog Groomers Association's certification test by applying lipstick to his cocker spaniel's snout and telling the test's judge, "I like a dog with a face."
His humor pieces for The New Yorker have included his imagining British taxi drivers reciting W.H. Auden's poetry to their passengers and a playlet composed entirely of Eugene O'Neill
's stage directions. (Both are collected in the New Yorker's humor anthology, Disquiet Please, and the O'Neill playlet has been taught at M.I.T.) In September 2007, the magazine published Alford's account of wearing a solar-powered jacket for three weeks.
He has contributed frequently to the Styles sections of the New York Times and to the New York Times Book Review, and written extensively about food and travel. Currently he writes the satirical column "Krysti McCandless, Rising Tea Party Superstar" in Vanity Fair
.
, the monthly satirical magazine edited and co-started by Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen. He began by sending in articles and later earned a staff writer position. During his time at Spy, Alford contributed such pieces as "What if the Brontë Sisters Were a Heavy Metal Band?", "How Famous Actors Sold Themselves When They Were Trying to Become Famous," and "You'll Never Groom Dogs in This Town Again."
In Spy: The Funny Years, the magazine's 20th Anniversary history/anthology, Alford recounts how he was once told by Spy founder Kurt Andersen to “never curb your tendency to aphorize.”
In his review of Municipal Bondage for The New York Times Book Review, novelist Robert Plunket called Alford "...a classicist, firmly in the mold of Wilde, Waugh, Benchley, and Lebowitz."
, and his work on a phone-sex party line. The New York Times called the book "the definitive work on theatrical humiliation."
Alford found success in his new career when he was cast as the co-host of the VH1 show Rock of Ages. On the show, Alford interviewed groups of children and senior citizens as they viewed and analyzed current music videos and memorabilia from rock 'n roll history. In his review of the show, Joel Stein wrote in Time magazine that Alford "elicits lines from small children that Bill Cosby
sweats whirlpools trying to score."
Big Kiss was also the genesis for an Off-Off Broadway show, "Big Kiss: An Evening of Humiliating Audition Stories." Co-produced and directed by his editor at Random House, Jonathan Karp, the show consisted of Alford and eight other actors performing self-written monologues about their most embarrassing audition experiences. Alford told John Tierney of The New York Times, "Once you call yourself a pathetic loser, you take that power away from others. You reclaim your pathos." Alford added, "Imagine if postal workers had an evening like this. We could save some lives."
Over the course of the book, Alford speaks with and visits a number of people over the age of seventy, some famous (playwright Edward Albee, actress Sylvia Miles, and literary critic Harold Bloom) and some offbeat (a Lutheran Pastor who thinks napping is a form of prayer; writer Sandra Tsing Loh's eccentric retired aerospace engineer father, who eats food out of the garbage), with the hopes that they might reveal some kind of sagacity that they have accrued over their lengthy lifespan.
When Alford asks his own mother, Ann, and step-father, Will, to reflect on what they've learned from their own experiences, he is the inadvertent catalyst to the couple's divorce. The book then follows Ann as she puts her wisdom on practical display, choosing to open a new chapter late in her life.
The book was named a Best Book of the Year by Publisher's Weekly. Newsweek called Alford "the Socrates of dilettantes." Reviewer Alex Beam wrote in the New York Times Book Review that when Alford tried to pass off a 14 year-old cat as a wise individual, Beam wrote in the margin of his copy of How to Live, "Check, please!"
Alford has written about manners for The New York Times and Vanity Fair.
The column often trafficked in pith: when the British Monarchy signed up for Twitter and Flickr accounts, Alford wrote simply, "GTSQ," and when President Obama offered a lackluster Oval Office address, Alford wrote, "O's first O.O. address. Oh."
McCandless' rants touch on everything from her adoration of Sarah Palin, how the film Black Swan is evidence of the need for immigration reform, and how the San Francisco Giant's 2011 World Series win is evidence of a pro-gay agenda.
His website states that his love of waffles has "caused small children to call him Henry Alfun".
He has also been heard on "Fresh Air", "All Things Considered", and the now defunct The Next Big Thing.
In an August, 2011 Vanity Fair article about Facebook, in which Alford likened having a Facebook page to "curating a tiny museum of ambiguous friendship," Alford wrote that his Facebook friends include "Stupid Pet Tricks inventor Merrill Markoe, actresses Martha Plimpton and Sarah Thyre, the New Yorker's Rebecca Mead and Nancy Franklin" and 124 Greek priests.
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
who has contributed to Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair (magazine)
Vanity Fair is a magazine of pop culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast. The present Vanity Fair has been published since 1983 and there have been editions for four European countries as well as the U.S. edition. This revived the title which had ceased publication in 1935...
and The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
for over a decade. He has also written for The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
. The author of three books, he won a Thurber Prize for his second, Big Kiss, an account of his attempt to become a working actor. His book about manners, "Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?" will be published in January, 2012.
Sometimes called an "investigative humorist," he is primarily known for his first-person quests and exploits. These include creating a gourmet meal out of food purchased at a 99-Cent Store, walking the streets of New York City in his pajamas, inviting a restaurant health inspector to rate his apartment's kitchen while he was serving lunch to friends, and trying to pass the National Dog Groomers Association's certification test by applying lipstick to his cocker spaniel's snout and telling the test's judge, "I like a dog with a face."
His humor pieces for The New Yorker have included his imagining British taxi drivers reciting W.H. Auden's poetry to their passengers and a playlet composed entirely of Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...
's stage directions. (Both are collected in the New Yorker's humor anthology, Disquiet Please, and the O'Neill playlet has been taught at M.I.T.) In September 2007, the magazine published Alford's account of wearing a solar-powered jacket for three weeks.
He has contributed frequently to the Styles sections of the New York Times and to the New York Times Book Review, and written extensively about food and travel. Currently he writes the satirical column "Krysti McCandless, Rising Tea Party Superstar" in Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair (magazine)
Vanity Fair is a magazine of pop culture, fashion, and current affairs published by Condé Nast. The present Vanity Fair has been published since 1983 and there have been editions for four European countries as well as the U.S. edition. This revived the title which had ceased publication in 1935...
.
Early Life
Alford was raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has painted a fairly rollicking portrait of his childhood; of his and his siblings' singing of Christmas carols in church, he wrote, "We can make 'Angels We Have Heard on High' sound like a scrum of Panzers." He studied film at New York University and worked as a casting director in the film industry for three years.Spy Magazine
From 1988 to 1994, Alford wrote for SpySpy (magazine)
Spy was a satirical monthly magazine founded in 1986 by Kurt Andersen and E. Graydon Carter, who served as its first editors, and Thomas L. Phillips, Jr., its first publisher. After one folding and a rebirth, it ceased publication in 1998...
, the monthly satirical magazine edited and co-started by Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen. He began by sending in articles and later earned a staff writer position. During his time at Spy, Alford contributed such pieces as "What if the Brontë Sisters Were a Heavy Metal Band?", "How Famous Actors Sold Themselves When They Were Trying to Become Famous," and "You'll Never Groom Dogs in This Town Again."
In Spy: The Funny Years, the magazine's 20th Anniversary history/anthology, Alford recounts how he was once told by Spy founder Kurt Andersen to “never curb your tendency to aphorize.”
Municipal Bondage
Alford's first book, Municipal Bondage was published in February, 1994 by Random House. A collection of essays and articles, many of which were previously featured in Spy and other magazines, the book documents Alford's adventurous exploration of modern urban living, including his hiring of two nude housecleaners, his trying to find work as an earlobe model, his volunteering to serve as the driver for the governor of Colorado during the 1992 Democratic Convention, and his untrained attempts to pass a variety of vocational exams.In his review of Municipal Bondage for The New York Times Book Review, novelist Robert Plunket called Alford "...a classicist, firmly in the mold of Wilde, Waugh, Benchley, and Lebowitz."
Big Kiss
Big Kiss: One Actor's Desperate Attempt to Claw His Way to the Top is Alford's memoir of his attempt, at the age of 34, to become a professional actor. In it he chronicles his summer training session at The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, playing an extra in the remake of Godzilla, his trip to improvisational comedy camp with his 69-year-old mother, his audition to voice Wilbur the Pig in Charlotte's WebCharlotte's Web
Charlotte's Web is an award-winning children's novel by acclaimed American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte. The book was first published in 1952, with illustrations by Garth Williams.The novel tells the story...
, and his work on a phone-sex party line. The New York Times called the book "the definitive work on theatrical humiliation."
Alford found success in his new career when he was cast as the co-host of the VH1 show Rock of Ages. On the show, Alford interviewed groups of children and senior citizens as they viewed and analyzed current music videos and memorabilia from rock 'n roll history. In his review of the show, Joel Stein wrote in Time magazine that Alford "elicits lines from small children that Bill Cosby
Kids Say the Darndest Things
Kids Say the Darndest Things is an American comedy series hosted by Bill Cosby that aired on CBS as a special on February 6, 1995 then as a full season from January 9, 1998 to June 23, 2000...
sweats whirlpools trying to score."
Big Kiss was also the genesis for an Off-Off Broadway show, "Big Kiss: An Evening of Humiliating Audition Stories." Co-produced and directed by his editor at Random House, Jonathan Karp, the show consisted of Alford and eight other actors performing self-written monologues about their most embarrassing audition experiences. Alford told John Tierney of The New York Times, "Once you call yourself a pathetic loser, you take that power away from others. You reclaim your pathos." Alford added, "Imagine if postal workers had an evening like this. We could save some lives."
How To Live
How To Live: A Search For Wisdom From Old People (While They Are Still On This Earth) documents Alford's journey to find and define the hard-won wisdom of the elderly. Early in the book, Alford describes the motivation behind his efforts: "If people are repositories of knowledge -- the death of an old person, an African saying runs, is like the burning of a library -- then I want a library card. I want borrowing privileges for the rest of my life."Over the course of the book, Alford speaks with and visits a number of people over the age of seventy, some famous (playwright Edward Albee, actress Sylvia Miles, and literary critic Harold Bloom) and some offbeat (a Lutheran Pastor who thinks napping is a form of prayer; writer Sandra Tsing Loh's eccentric retired aerospace engineer father, who eats food out of the garbage), with the hopes that they might reveal some kind of sagacity that they have accrued over their lengthy lifespan.
When Alford asks his own mother, Ann, and step-father, Will, to reflect on what they've learned from their own experiences, he is the inadvertent catalyst to the couple's divorce. The book then follows Ann as she puts her wisdom on practical display, choosing to open a new chapter late in her life.
The book was named a Best Book of the Year by Publisher's Weekly. Newsweek called Alford "the Socrates of dilettantes." Reviewer Alex Beam wrote in the New York Times Book Review that when Alford tried to pass off a 14 year-old cat as a wise individual, Beam wrote in the margin of his copy of How to Live, "Check, please!"
Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That?
Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That?: A Modern Guide To Manners is Alford's fourth book and scheduled to be released on January 3, 2012. In the book, Alford acts as a tour guide for foreigners; travels to the manners capital of the world, Japan; and speaks with manners experts ranging from Miss Manners and Tim Gunn to a former prisoner and an army sergeant, all in the hopes of finding "ways we can treat each other better."Alford has written about manners for The New York Times and Vanity Fair.
Crib Sheet
Crib Sheet: 10 Things to Talk About This Weekend was a column, written by Alford, that ran each week in the Thursday Style section of The New York Times from April 2010 to April 2011. The column consisted of Alford's humorous probing of the week's news, in which he would often connect seemingly disparate stories in order identify a larger trend. For example, for the first item on the April 7, 2010 column, Alford wrote, "The Museum of Modern Art has added the @ sign to its architecture and design collection; the iPad’s apostrophe key is difficult to find. Punctuation is going all diva on us."The column often trafficked in pith: when the British Monarchy signed up for Twitter and Flickr accounts, Alford wrote simply, "GTSQ," and when President Obama offered a lackluster Oval Office address, Alford wrote, "O's first O.O. address. Oh."
Krysti McCandless
Taking America Beaa-yack is a Vanity Fair column that Alford currently writes which consists of the first-person campaign journal entries of Krysti McCandless, a fictional "rising Tea Party superstar." A conservative entrepreneur (she is the owner of Fruit Poodles, the deliverable fruit bouquet) McCandless is admittedly "fed-up" with the current state of the country and decides to run for County Council of Montgomery County, Maryland. She is aided by her husband Critter, whose troubles include "all that Robitussin and paternity stuff."McCandless' rants touch on everything from her adoration of Sarah Palin, how the film Black Swan is evidence of the need for immigration reform, and how the San Francisco Giant's 2011 World Series win is evidence of a pro-gay agenda.
Food Journalism
Alford has contributed frequently to The New York Times Dining Section, where he has written about his newfound love of goat meat, his attempt to create a gourmet meal out of food purchased at a 99-cent store, inviting over a New York City Health Inspector to rate his kitchen while he prepared lunch for friends, and his one month trial of the "Imagination Diet." Alford has also written for Food and Wine.His website states that his love of waffles has "caused small children to call him Henry Alfun".
Collages
Alford has written a number of fact-based humor articles in the style of collages. Their subject matter has included book acknowledgements, politician's apologies, and bed and breakfast brochures.Radio
Alford has contributed often to the public radio show "Studio 360"; his pieces include taking a former gang member to see the Broadway production of "West Side Story", starting his own artists colony, and creating a musical composition from the noises made by the radiator in his and others' apartments.He has also been heard on "Fresh Air", "All Things Considered", and the now defunct The Next Big Thing.
Personal Life
Alford lives in New York City in a part of town he calls "the Adorable Restaurants district". He is openly gay.In an August, 2011 Vanity Fair article about Facebook, in which Alford likened having a Facebook page to "curating a tiny museum of ambiguous friendship," Alford wrote that his Facebook friends include "Stupid Pet Tricks inventor Merrill Markoe, actresses Martha Plimpton and Sarah Thyre, the New Yorker's Rebecca Mead and Nancy Franklin" and 124 Greek priests.