David Hajdu is the award-winning author of three acclaimed books of nonfiction: Lush Life, the biography of jazz composer Billy Strayhorn; Positively 4th Street, a group portrait of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Richard Farina, and Mimi Baez Farina; and The Ten-Cent Plague, the story of the hysteria over comic books in the McCarthy Era, which transformed American popular culture.
He is the music critic for The New Republic and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Review of Books. Over the past twenty years, he has been a winner or a finalist for the National Magazine Award, the National Book Critics' Circle Award, the Deems-Taylor Award, and other honors.
A though-provoking authority on popular culture, he has appeared on television shows such as The Colbert Report, CNN, Nightline, The Today Show, and Good Morning America, as well as on radio programs such as Fresh Air, Morning Edition, and All Things Considered.
A full-time professor at Columbia University, he teaches the seminar in Arts and Culture in the Columbia Journalism School. He was previously Nonfiction Writer in Residence at the University of Chicago, and he has lectured at, among others, New York University, Rutgers, and Tufts.
He lives in New York with his wife, the jazz singer Karen Oberlin, and their young son Nathan.