Background
Brooks, who is Jewish, was born in Toronto, Canada – his father was a US citizen living in Canada at the time – and grew up in New York City in Stuyvesant Town. He graduated from Grace Church School in New York City, Radnor High School (located in a Main Line suburb of Philadelphia) in 1979 and from the University of Chicago, with a degree in history, in 1983.
Brooks edited a 1996 anthology of writings by new conservative writers, Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing. He wrote a book of cultural commentary titled Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, published in 2000, and followed it four years later with On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. Brooks is the volume editor of The Best American Essays (publication date Oct. 2, 2012).
He also authored The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement. The book was excerpted in The New Yorker magazine in January 2011 and received mixed reviews upon its full publication, by Random House, in March of that year. The book has been a commercial success, reaching the #3 spot on the Publishers Weekly best-sellers list for non-fiction in April 2011.
Brooks was a visiting professor of public policy at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, and he taught an undergraduate seminar there in the fall of 2006.
He and his wife live in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Northwest Washington, DC.
Read more about this topic: David Brooks (journalist)
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