David Hajdu
Professor of Journalism
David Hajdu is one of the most respected arts critics in America. Currently the staff music critic for The Nation, he served as music critic for The New Republic for 12 years. In a career spanning more than 30 years, he has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Harper's and other publications.
Hajdu is the author of five books: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America, Heroes and Villains: Essays on Movies, Music, Comics and Culture, and Love for Sale: Pop Music in America. He is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and three-time winner of the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing. His book Lush Life was named one of "Hundred Best Nonfiction Books of All Time" by The New York Times.
His latest book is a work of "fictional nonfiction," a satirical biography of a nonexistent songwriter, to be published by W.W. Norton in 2020. In addition to writing about music, Hajdu writes music himself. The second album of songs he co-wrote, Ice on the Hudson, was released in 2018.
Hajdu's work-in-progress is a book of graphic nonfiction set in the era of vaudeville, which he is creating with the artist John Carey.