乔·麦金尼斯

乔·麦金尼斯（英语：Joe McGinniss, Sr.，1942年12月9日—2014年3月10日），是一个美国作家，他撰写了大量的政治书籍，包括尼克松、里根、佩林和奥巴马。

他出生于纽约市，并在圣十字学院学习。他因为前列腺癌去世，享年71岁。

Joseph Ralph McGinniss Sr. (December 9, 1942 – March 10, 2014) was an American non-fiction writer and novelist. He was the author of twelve books.

McGinniss first came to prominence with the best-selling The Selling of the President 1968 which described the marketing of then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon. He is popularly known for his trilogy of bestselling true crime books—Fatal Vision, Blind Faith and Cruel Doubt—which were adapted into TV miniseries in the 1980s and 90s. His last book was The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, an account of Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska who was the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee.

Early life and education

McGinniss was born in Manhattan, the only child of travel agent Joseph A. McGinniss and Mary (née Leonard), a secretary at CBS. He was raised in Forest Hills, Queens, and Rye, New York. In his youth he was given a chance to pick a middle name and chose Ralph, after the baseball player Ralph Kiner.

McGinniss attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains and then was educated at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, graduating in 1964. After his application to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism was rejected, something he later pointed to with pride, he became a general assignment reporter at the Worcester Telegram. He left within a year to become a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Bulletin before joining The Philadelphia Inquirer as a general interest columnist. In 1979, he became a writer-in-residence at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

From 1982 to 1985, he taught creative writing at Bennington College in Vermont. While at Bennington, his students included Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis. At the time of his death, The New York Times described him as a "gregarious man who was generous with other writers."

Career

The Selling of the President

McGinniss's first book, The Selling of the President 1968, landed on The New York Times Best Seller list when he was 26 years old, making him the youngest living writer with that achievement. The book was on The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for 31 weeks from October 1969 to May 1970. The book described the marketing of Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign. The idea for the book came to McGinniss almost serendipitously:

[He] stumbled across his book's topic while taking a train to New York. A fellow commuter had just landed the Hubert Humphrey account and was boasting that 'in six weeks we'll have him looking better than Abraham Lincoln.' McGinniss tried to get access to Humphrey's campaign first, but they turned him down. So he called up Nixon's, and they said yes.

The book was well received by critics and has been recognized as a "classic of campaign reporting that first introduced many readers to the stage-managed world of political theater." Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, who served as a Richard Nixon campaign adviser and featured prominently in the book, said in a statement that McGinniss "changed political writing forever in 1968." It "spent more than six months on best-sellers lists ... and McGinniss sold a lot of those books through television, appearing on the titular shows of Merv Griffin, David Frost, and Dick Cavett, among others." Conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr., "assumed McGinniss had relied on 'an elaborate deception which has brought joy and hope to the Nixon-haters.' But even Buckley liked the book."

After the success of his book in 1968, McGinniss left the Inquirer to write books full-time. He next wrote a novel, The Dream Team. It was followed by Heroes and Going to Extremes, a nonfiction account of his year exploring Alaska.

Fatal Vision

In the 1980s and early '90s, McGinniss wrote a trilogy of bestselling true crime books, Fatal Vision, Blind Faith and Cruel Doubt. All three books were made into television miniseries, with Fatal Vision (1984) and Blind Faith (1990) receiving Emmy Award nominations.