Susan Orlean

New Yorker writer Susan Orlean is known for her quirky stories about "ordinary" people who are not normally in the public eye or consciousness, but in whose very ordinariness Orlean finds something extraordinary. These include a profile of a ten-year-old boy, a woman in suburban New Jersey who keeps tigers, and a New York taxi driver who also happens to be the king of the Ashanti.

"An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain," she writes in the introduction to The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People (2001). “I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it. The challenge was to write these stories in a way that got other people as interested in them as I was.”

Susan Orlean was born on October 31, 1955, in Cleveland, Ohio. Her father was a real estate developer and her mother worked in a bank. Orlean studied literature and history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she wrote poetry.

Orlean got hooked on nonfiction when, as a young girl, she began reading “slice of life" stories about what it was like to be a country doctor or policeman in Life magazine. “There was this notion in Life that subjects like these were genuine ‘stories.’ The idea of writing about something real was enormously appealing to me,” she says.

After college, Orlean moved to Portland, Oregon, where she worked for Paper Rose, later, Willamette Week, where she wrote music reviews and features.

In 1982, she moved to Boston to write for The Boston Phoenix and The Boston Globe. Her first book, Red Sox and Bluefish: And Other Things that Make New England New England (1987), collects her pieces from the Globe. She also started writing Saturday Night (1990), a book that chronicles how people across the United States spend Saturday evenings.

Orlean moved to New York in 1986, where she wrote for Rolling Stone and Vogue. Soon after she arrived, she heard that The New Yorker was looking for writers for the “Talk of the Town” section. Orlean became a staff writer in 1992.

In 1994, she read a newspaper article on the theft by a man named Lohn Laroche of two hundred rare orchids from the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park in Florida. Orlean interviewed Laroche after sitting through his trial, and the result was Orchid Fever, which Orlean expanded into The Orchid Thief (1998).

Orlean and her husband live in New York and Boston. They have a red-and-white Welsh springer spaniel named Cooper, with whom Orlean wrote Throw Me a Bone: 50 Healthy, Canine Taste-Tested Recipes for Snacks, Meals, and Treats (2003). Her second collection, My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere was published in 2004. Her latest project, a biography of dog actor Rin Tin Tin, was published by Simon and Schuster in October, 2011.