Life
After a classical education at the Portsmouth Abbey School, Buckley graduated from Yale University in 1975. He was a member of Skull and Bones like his father, living at Jonathan Edwards College. He became managing editor of Esquire Magazine.
In 1981, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work as chief speechwriter for Vice President George H. W. Bush. This experience led to his novel The White House Mess, a satire on White House office politics and political memoirs. (The title refers to the White House lunchroom, which is known as the "mess" because the Navy operates it.)
Thank You for Smoking is another satire, its protagonist a lobbyist for the tobacco industry, Nick Naylor. He followed that with more humor about Washington in the form of Little Green Men, about the government agency investigating UFO sightings. His No Way To Treat A First Lady has the president's wife on trial for assassinating her husband and Florence of Arabia is about a do-gooding State Department bureaucrat in the Middle East. His one serious novel, Wet work, is about a billionaire businessman avenging his granddaughter's death from drugs.
Thank You for Smoking was adapted into a movie written and directed by Jason Reitman, and starring Aaron Eckhart. It was released on 17 March 2006.
Buckley also wrote the non-fiction Steaming To Bamboola, about the merchant marine, as well as contributed to an oral history of Milford, Connecticut, and is an editor at Forbes Magazine. Buckley has written for many national newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time, The Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, US News & World Report, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Conde Nast Traveler and numerous humorous essays in The New Yorker.
Read more about this topic: Christopher Buckley (novelist)
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“Chaucer sawed life in half and out tumbled hundreds of unpremeditated lives, because he didn’t have the cast-iron grid of a priori coherence that makes reading Goethe, Shakespeare, or Dante an exercise in searching for signs of life among the conventions, compulsions, self-justifications, proofs, wise saws, simple but powerful messages, and poetry.”
—Marvin Mudrick (1921–1986)
“The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man. On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)