Rick Bayan

I was born at the midpoint of the 20th century and grew up in New Brunswick, NJ. After graduating from Rutgers as a history major, I earned a master's in journalism to make myself marginally more employable. I worked as an underpaid editor and copywriter in New York until 1985, when Day-Timers (the original personal organizer company) offered me a grown-up salary as their advertising copy chief in Allentown, PA. While there, I wrote The Cynic's Dictionary (Morrow, 1994) on my office computer after everyone had left for the day.

After 14 years at Day-Timers, I called it quits and leaped into the perilous world of freelance writing and consulting. As RICHARD Bayan (my "serious" professional alter ego), I'm the author of the advertising thesaurus Words That Sell and its spawn, More Words That Sell. I've published three essay collections, and for 15 years I wrote a political blog, The New Moderate, for America's embattled centrists. The Life of Jeremy Dodo was 40 years in the making -- begun in the mid-1980s, shelved for decades, and finally completed after my son went off to college. Since 2001 I've been living in a converted Victorian livery stable in Philadelphia. Wish me luck, and buy my books!