Joe McGinniss
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Joe McGinniss (born 1942) is an American author of true crime and non-fiction novels.
Biography
McGinniss graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 1964 and became a general assignment reporter at the Worcester Telegram in Worcester, MA. Within a year he left to become a sportswriter for The Philadelphia Bulletin. He then moved to the The Philadelphia Inquirer as a general interest columnist. McGinniss became an overnight success when his first book, The Selling of the President, landed on The New York Times bestseller list when he was 26 years old, making him the youngest living writer with that achievement. The book described the marketing of Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign.
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 the warmly received Going to Extremes, a nonfiction account of his year exploring Alaska.
In 1979 he became a writer-in-residence at the L.A. Herald Examiner. Next came the McGinniss trilogy of true crime books, Fatal Vision, Blind Faith and Cruel Doubt. All three books were made into TV miniseries. His 1983 account of the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case, Fatal Vision, was a best-seller. MacDonald sued McGinniss in 1984, alleging that McGinniss pretended to believe MacDonald innocent after he came to the conclusion that MacDonald was guilty, in order to continue MacDonald's cooperation with him. After a six-week civil trial that resulted in a hung jury, McGinniss's publisher's insurance company chose to settle out of court with MacDonald for an undisclosed amount. In her book The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm used the McGinniss-MacDonald trial to explore the problematic relationship between journalists and their subjects.
The Last Brother: The Rise and Fall of Teddy Kennedy (1993) brought McGinniss more controversy, primarily from writers sympathetic to the Kennedys. One prominent critic, Doris Kearns Goodwin, suggested that some of his writing came close to plagiarism, although this was never substantiated. (Goodwin herself subsequently suffered a plagiarism scandal over material used in her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.)
In 1995, McGinniss sat through the O.J. Simpson trial, expecting to write a book about it, but he returned the advance after Simpson was acquitted, saying the trial had been "a farce." His next book, the critically acclaimed The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, followed the fortunes of an Italian soccer team from a tiny town during one dramatic season in the big leagues.
The Big Horse was published in (2004). In his most recent book Never Enough, McGinniss returned to his study of the dark side of the American family with a nonfiction account of the murder of investment banker Robert Kissel by his wife Nancy in Hong Kong.
Works
- The Selling of the President (1969)
- The Dream Team (1972)
- Heroes (1976)
- Going to Extremes (1980)
- Fatal Vision (1983)
- Blind Faith (1989)
- Cruel Doubt (1991)
- The Last Brother: The Rise and Fall of Teddy Kennedy (1993)
- The Miracle of Castel di Sangro (1999), the story of Castel di Sangro Calcio.
- The Big Horse (2004)
- Never Enough (2007)
