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Article: Celebrity Profile: Po Bronson, author

Article Group List / Workplace / Celebrity Profile: Po Bronson, author

Celebrity Profile: Po Bronson, author

Po Bronson's 1999 book, The Nudist on the Late Shift and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley, was hailed as "Revenge of the Nerds meets The Right Stuff" by The Wall Street Journal - but ten years ago Po Bronson had no idea which direction his life was heading.  Today, this Stanford grad has written three books about the culture of the dot-com world and is internationally recognized as a leading voice in commentary about technology - both from his website, www.pobronson.com, and the numerous articles he pens each month for publications like Wired and The New York Times Magazine.

He says he got interested in writing books in college, when he started taking art classes along with his financial ones and developed an interest in children's book illustrations.  He also started writing extensively in a journal, as well as penning columns for the Stanford newspaper.  Upon graduation with a degree in economics, he abandoned his literary leanings for a job on Wall Street as an investment banker - a career he soon fled in favor of graduate school in creative writing at San Francisco State.  He took classes for seven years, during which time he wrote stories that he later characterized as "very 'first novelly,' first person attempts to tell dryly emotional stories without being sentimental." While enrolled in school, he was also looking for a full-time job, and had employment stints as a litigation consultant, publisher of a newsletter on San Francisco politics, and high school teacher, as well as working for a literary book publisher and starting his own greeting card company.

He says that what finally got him published was a sense of frustration with the direction his life was heading. "Something unleashed," he says.  "Writing with anger and passion was a totally different feeling.  My writing was so much better." Soon after this breakthrough, he wrote his first full-length novel, Bombardiers, which was published in 1995 by Random House.  The publication of his second book, The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest, cemented his place as both a prose artist and a wry commentator on the influence of technology in Americans' lives at the turn of the millenium, a writer whom Lewis Lapham has referred to as "the bard of Silicon Alley."