Susan Orlean, the author of Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend and The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession, has been called “a kind of latter-day Tocqueville” (New York Times Book Review). One of her generation’s most distinctive journalistic voices, Orlean is fascinated by American stories of every stripe. From Rin Tin Tin, the orphaned German shepherd who became a silent film star in the 1920’s, to John Laroche, the convicted felon who slinks through the swamps of southern Florida looking for rare orchids, Orlean has an eye for the moving, the hilarious, and the surprising. She has written for Outside, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and The Boston Globe, been a staff writer at the New Yorker for twenty years, and has edited both Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. Orlean’s writing has inspired two films, including Adaptation, the Academy Award-winning film directed by Spike Jonze and starring Meryl Streep. She is currently working on The Library Book, an exploration of the history, power and future of the endangered institutions, told through the lens of her quest to solve the unsolved 1986 arson that nearly destroyed the Los Angeles Public Library.

Selected Books: Rin Tin Tin, The Orchid Thief, My Kind of Place