Biography of Buzz Bissinger

Author of the acclaimed Friday Night Lights (a best-selling book made into the recent hit movie), Bissinger has been the winner of such prestigious awards as the Pulitzer Prize, the Livingston Award, the American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award, the National Headliners Award and nearly two dozen other national, state and local awards. He is also author of the recently published Three Nights In August, sure to become a sports classic.

Remarkably varied in his writing skills, Bissinger has been a reporter at some of the nation's most prestigious newspapers; a magazine writer with published work in Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine and Sports Illustrated; an author with two highly acclaimed non-fiction books to his credit and a co-producer and writer for the ABC television drama NYPD Blue.

Bissinger has been a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer where, with two other reporters, he won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting for a six-part series on the Philadelphia Court System. Bissinger was also an investigative journalist for the Chicago Tribune.

In 1988 Bissinger moved to Odessa, TX, to write Friday Night Lights, a book about the impact of high school football on small-town life. The bestselling book, published in 1990, has sold close to 800,000 copies in both hardcover and paperback and has never gone out of print. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for 15 weeks when it was first published in hardcover and reemerged on the Times' non-fiction paperback bestseller list in the fall of 2003.

In a ranking by the staff of Sports Illustrated of the 100 best books written on the subject of sports, whether fiction or non-fiction, Friday Night Lights was named the fourth best sports book ever and the best ever written on the subject of football. ESPN in its ranking called Friday Night Lights the best sports book of the past 25 years. ESPN.Com, in a newly-formed sports book club last fall, made the book its first selection. It has been required reading at hundreds of high schools and colleges around the country. The film version of the book, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Tim McGraw and produced by Imagine Entertainment and Universal, was released this October to widespread acclaim as perhaps the best sports movie ever made because of its close parallels to the book.

In 1992, Bissinger returned to Philadelphia to begin work on A Prayer for the City. Granted unprecedented access by Mayor Edward G. Rendell, Bissinger's book, five and a half years in the making, garnered critical acclaim nationwide and was hailed as a classic on urban America.

The New York Times Book Review called A Prayer For The City "...a full-scale portrait of a struggling American metropolis that brings to mind such classics of urban reportage and analysis as J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground." The New York Review of Books called it "extraordinary" and the New Yorker described it as "fascinating and humane".

Bissinger's teleplay and screenwriting work includes spending the 2000-01 television season in Los Angeles as a co-producer and writer for NYPD Blue.

Bissinger is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine, where his range of subjects has included Pete Rose; the brutal killing of a gay soldier at an army barracks in Ft. Campbell, KY, and the first in-depth profile of Los Angles police detective Mark Fuhrman in the aftermath of the O.J. Simpson trial. Another of his pieces for the magazine, "Shattered Glass", about young Washington journalist Stephen Glass, formed the basis for the highly acclaimed film "Shattered Glass" which was released in 2003.

His newest book, Three Nights In August, about major league baseball and the timeless beauty of the game through the eyes of its most innovative manager, St. Louis Cardinals skipper Tony La Russa, was published in March, 2005 by Houghton-Mifflin.