David Shields

Shields was born in Los Angeles in 1956 to a lower-middle-class Jewish family.

He has an older sister, a half-brother, and a half-sister.

Both of Shields's parents were journalists.

His mother, the West Coast correspondent for the Nation for many years, was a political activist; his father worked as a speechwriter for progressive politicians.

In 1962, the family moved to San Francisco, where Shields's parents were deeply involved in the local anti-war and civil rights community, frequently opening up their home to those in need of short- or long-term shelter.

In 1978, Shields graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, from Brown University, with a Bachelor of Arts, with Honors, in British and American Literature.

In 1980, he received a Master of Fine Arts, with Honors in Fiction, from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Shields's debut novel, Heroes, about a Midwestern sportswriter's fascination with a college basketball player, was published by Simon & Schuster in 1984.

From 1985 to 1988, he was a visiting assistant professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY.

In 1989, Knopf published Shields's second novel, Dead Languages, a semi-autobiographical novel about a boy growing up with a severe stutter.

Dead Languages is a work of fiction, but it incorporates significantly larger shards of reality than Shields's first book, marking the initial phase of Shields's transition toward nonfiction, which would ultimately lead him to employ the literary collage and ‘anti-novel’ forms for which he is most well-known.

In 1992, his novel-in-stories, Handbook for Drowning, was published by Knopf.

In 1996, Shields became a faculty member in the Warren Wilson College low-residency MFA Program for Writers, a position he still holds.

That same year, his fourth book, Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, Shields's first work of literary collage, was published by Knopf.

Between 1997 and 2009, Shields published five books: Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (Random House, 1999), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA award; Baseball Is Just Baseball: The Understated Ichiro (TNI Books, 2001), which achieved bestseller status in Japan; Enough About You: Notes toward the New Autobiography (Simon & Schuster, 2002); Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine (Simon & Schuster, 2004); and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), a New York Times bestseller.

In 2001, Shields became a visiting instructor at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and has taught there ever since.

In 2010, Shields's tenth book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, was published by Knopf.

In Vanity Fair, Elissa Schappell called Reality Hunger an “arousing call to arms for all artists to reject the laws governing appropriation, obliterate the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, and give rise to a new modern form for a new century.” Reality Hunger was recently named one of the 100 most important books of the 2010s by LitHub. In 2011, Norton published The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, an anthology Shields co-edited with Brad Morrow.

In 2012, New Harvest published Jeff, One Lonely Guy, a collage co-written by Shields, Jeff Ragsdale, and Michael Logan.

Later that year, an anthology co-edited by Shields and Matthew Vollmer, Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, was published by Norton.

In 2013, Knopf published How Literature Saved My Life, a blend of confessional criticism and cultural autobiography.

Also in 2013, Simon & Schuster published Salinger, an “oral biography” of J.D. Salinger by Shields and Shane Salerno.

Salinger was a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

In 2015, Hawthorne Books published Life Is Short — Art is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity, which Shields co-edited with Elizabeth Cooperman.

In 2015, Shields also published That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews as told to David Shields (McSweeney's); I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, co-written with Caleb Powell; and War Is Beautiful: The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict (powerHouse) a deconstruction of that newspaper's front-page war photography.

The film adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017.

Other People: Takes & Mistakes was published by Knopf in 2017.

That same year, First Pond Entertainment released the film adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, written by Shields and Powell, starring Shields and Powell and James Franco, and directed by Franco.

The trio debate the value of life versus art; art wins, barely.

The film is available now on Vudu.

In 2018, Shields's book Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention was published by Thought Catalog Books.

David Shields is an American author who has published twenty-four books, including Reality Hunger (which, in 2019, Lit Hub named one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (a New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice).

The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.

Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch's use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance.

A new film, How We Got Here, which argues that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Žižek (squared) equals Bannon, is forthcoming in January 2024, as is a companion volume of the same name.

The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, the PEN/Revson Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, Shields—a senior contributing editor of the literary journal Conjunctions—has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney's, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays.

His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

In 2019, The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power was published by Mad Creek Books.

Later the same year, Shields's debut documentary, Lynch: A History, an ode to Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance, premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival.

The film, which Shields wrote, produced, and directed, was named one of the five best films at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam and has won numerous awards, including the Golden SunBreak Award for Best Documentary and the End of Cinema Award for Best Nonfiction Film.