James Howard 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, housing tracts, 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.
    His next book in the series, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, published by Simon & Schuster / Free Press, is a look 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 book, The Long Emergency, published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in 2005, is about the challenges posed by the coming permanent global oil crisis, climate change, and other "converging catastrophes of the 21st Century."
    The Atlantic Monthly Press also published his novel, Maggie Darling, in 2004.
    Mr. Kunstler is also the author of eight other novels including The Halloween Ball, An Embarrassment of Riches. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Sunday Magazine and Op-Ed page, where he has written on environmental and economic issues.
    Mr. 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 Univerity of New York, Brockport campus, 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 the related design fields.
    He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, RPI, the University of Virginia and many other colleges, and he has appeared before many professional organizations such as the AIA , the APA., and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
    He lives in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York

James Howard Kunstler
on the patio, freshly scrubbed
and wondering what's for supper.

James Howard Kunstler in grown-up costume and winter hair-do.

Scooter the tabby cat as a kitten
and Sammy the dachshund (d. 2008).
They were great pals.

The garden in early July 2008

Scooter guarding the birdhouse

Me in Bakersfield, CA with new mustache

On an outing in Columbia County, NY.
Photo by Jonathan Postal.

The Bunk-house at Schroon Lake.
My first work of architecture.

Fire Island, 1951

Publication Party for The Halloween Ball, 1987
I ate a sensimilla bud and did Stoly shots.

As a crypto-hippie age 23 in 1972 on a fall afternoon near Falmouth, Mass. I am attempting to juggle.

San Francisco, 1974, working for Rolling Stone

Around 1980, vicinity of Saratoga Springs