Bruno Maddox - Early Years

Early Years

Maddox was born in London in 1969 to former Nature editor Sir John Maddox, a writer on science and nature, and Brenda Maddox, a biographer of Rosalind Franklin, W.B. Yeats, Nora Barnacle and several others. He has one sister, Bronwen, who became a journalist and is Chief Foreign Commentator of The Times as of 2008. Maddox enjoyed a privileged life during his childhood and youth, because of his father's position as editor of Nature, encountering some of the leading scientific thinkers of the day and enjoying dinners with figures such as James Watson and Sir Fred Hoyle.

Despite his family's background in science, Maddox was interested in the humanities while he attended Westminster School, an independent boys' school in London. Maddox went on to study English literature at Harvard University and graduated in 1992. He published his first and only article in the student newspaper The Harvard Crimson during his senior year. He won the undergraduate Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for his senior thesis "on the use of adjectives in restaurant menus" titled Maltese: A Gastrosophic Theory of Reading. After graduation Maddox moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Moscow—where he worked for three weeks as the English-language editor of a Russian magazine—and then to New York City, where he spent two years working odd jobs, including hand-delivering celebrity invitations to local parties.

Maddox's freelance writing career began in 1994, when he became a book reviewer for The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post, where he developed a reputation for writing scathing reviews that would later help him land a job as an editor at Spy magazine. Maddox described his book reviewing style as "pretty vicious", and quipped that he "was a frustrated, twenty-something guy, sitting in his bedroom venting existential rage on these nasty academics". His last book review for The Washington Post was in late 1996; however, he continued reviewing for The New York Times up until 1998, contributing only a couple of reviews thereafter.

At the beginning of the dot-com boom, Maddox found full-time work at an information technology company, where he worked for a year and a half.