Author of The Long Emergency (Grove/Atlantic), The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere (Simon & Schuster), and The City in Mind (Free Press), and most recently the novel World Made By Hand, set in the post-oil American future.

Mr. Kunstler says he wrote The Geography of Nowhere, "Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, McHousing subdivisions, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work."

Home From Nowhere was a continuation of that discussion with an emphasis on the remedies. A portion of it appeared as the cover story in the September 1996 Atlantic Monthly.

The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition is a wide-ranging look at cities here and abroad, an inquiry into what makes them great (or miserable), and in particular what America is going to do with it's mutilated cities.

His latest non-fiction book, The Long Emergency, published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in 2005, describes the critical problems faced by industrial societies in the waning of the petroleum age. An excerpt ran in Rolling Stone Magazine, in March 2009.

James Kunstler is also the author of nine previous novels including The Halloween Ball, An Embarrassment of Riches, and Maggie Darling and has been a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he has written on environmental and economic issues.

James Kunstler was born in New York City in 1948. He moved to the Long Island suburbs in 1954 and returned to the city in 1957 where he spent most of his childhood. He graduated from the State University of New York, worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. He has no formal training in architecture or urban planning.

He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, and many other colleges, and has appeared before many professional organizations such as the AIA, ASLA, the APA., and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

He lives in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York.

James Howard Kunstler Lectures and Speeches