David Sedaris

David Raymond Sedaris, born December 26, 1956, is an American humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor whose public career began in the early 1990s with a voice made for confession, embarrassment, and exact comic timing. He first drew wide attention in 1992, when National Public Radio broadcast his essay “Santaland Diaries,” about his purported experiences working as an elf at Macy’s during Christmas in New York. The piece made him, in the words of The New York Times, “a minor phenomenon,” and opened the way for a career built on essays read aloud, printed in magazines, and collected in books.

Sedaris was born in Johnson City, New York, to Sharon Elizabeth Leonard and Louis Harry “Lou” Sedaris, an IBM engineer. His mother was Anglo-American, and his father was born in the United States to immigrants from Apidea in Laconia, Greece. Raised Greek Orthodox, Sedaris grew up in a suburban area of Raleigh, North Carolina, the second oldest of six children: Lisa, Gretchen, Amy, Tiffany, and Paul. His sister Amy Sedaris became both an actress and a writing collaborator. Family life, including grief, has remained part of his work; after Tiffany died by suicide in 2013, he discussed her death in the essay “Now We Are Five,” later included in Calypso.

His education was uneven before it became useful to him as material. After graduating from Jesse O. Sanderson High School in Raleigh, he briefly attended Western Carolina University, transferred to Kent State University, and dropped out in 1977. In his teens and twenties he tried visual and performance art, later describing his lack of success in essays. He moved to Chicago in 1983 and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987. Around this time he kept diaries, a habit that became central to his career.

While working odd jobs in Raleigh, Chicago, and New York City, Sedaris was discovered in a Chicago club by radio host Ira Glass, who heard him reading from a diary he had kept since 1977. Glass invited him onto The Wild Room, and Sedaris later said, “I owe everything to Ira... My life just changed completely, like someone waved a magic wand.” After “Santaland Diaries,” he recorded monthly NPR segments based on diary entries, signed a two-book deal with Little, Brown and Company, and published his first collection, Barrel Fever, in 1994.

His next book, Naked, appeared in 1997 and became his first in a run of New York Times bestsellers. It won the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Non-Fiction in 1998. Holidays on Ice, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and When You Are Engulfed in Flames also became bestsellers. Me Talk Pretty One Day, written mostly in France over seven months, won the 2001 Thurber Prize for American Humor. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim reached number one on The New York Times Nonfiction Best Seller List in 2004, and its audiobook, read by Sedaris, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. He was also nominated that year for Best Comedy Album for Live at Carnegie Hall.

Sedaris’s humor is often autobiographical and self-deprecating. It draws on his family, middle-class upbringing, Greek heritage, homosexuality, jobs, education, drug use, obsessive behaviors, and life in France, London, New York, and the South Downs in England. He has continued to publish books, appear on radio, and read his essays before live audiences, including the BBC Radio 4 series Meet David Sedaris. In 2019, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work keeps finding readers and listeners because it treats ordinary shame, family tension, strange work, and private habit as things worth saying plainly, and often laughing at first.