"I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners - two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime."
      —from Holidays in Hell

Born in 1947 in Toledo, Ohio, P.J. O'Rourke graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, then won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study for an M.A. in English at Johns Hopkins.  In the early 1970s, he wrote for and edited several "underground" publications, including a Baltimore weekly called Harry.  He joined the National Lampoon in 1973, became its managing editor in 1975, and was named editor-in-chief in 1978.  While at the Lampoon he co-wrote, with Doug Kenney, The National Lampoon 1964 Yearbook Parody and, with John Hughes, The National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper Parody.

After leaving the Lampoon in 1981, O'Rourke became a freelance writer for such publications as Car and Driver, Automobile, American Spectator, Playboy, Esquire, Vanity Fair, House and Garden, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Parade, Smart, Harper's, and Rolling Stone, where he was the magazine's Foreign Affairs Desk Chief.  Currently he is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and serves as the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow of the Cato Institute.

O'Rourke's books have been translated into a dozen languages and have been bestsellers worldwide.  Three have been New York Times hardcover bestsellers: Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance, both of which went to #1, and All the Trouble in the World.  When not on the road, P.J. O'Rourke divides his time between New Hampshire and Washington, DC.