Rich Cohen, American non-fiction writer

Joy Radio supports Words & Music, A literary feast in New Orleans, Nov. 28-Dec.2 by interviewing Rich Cohen on Tuesday, Oct. 30 at 1 pm, ET. Mr. Cohen is an American non-fiction writer, who has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 2006. There, he has written a wide range of articles for the magazine, among them an investigative report about Israel’s secretive counterterrorism operation Sayeret Matkal, an analysis of Hitler’s Toothbrush mustache, and cover stories on George Clooney, Madonna, and Angelina Jolie. Cohen is the author of five books, including Tough Jews (Simon & Schuster, 1998) and Sweet and Low (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), and his articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. His new book this year is The Fish That Ate The Whale: The Life and Times of Samuel Zemurray, a biography of the making of a powerful entrepreneur, who started life selling over-ripe bananas for United Fruit Company and ultimately captured the company for himself. Born and raised in Lake Forest, IL, he grew up in Chicago's North Shore suburb of Glencoe and attended the same high school as Rock Hudson and Donald Rumsfeld. He received his BA from Tulane University in 1990. He now lives, with his “ridiculously large family,” in Ridgefield, CT.