Adam Gopnik, legendary and beloved writer for the New Yorker, has—in his three decades with the magazine—written fiction, humor, memoirs, critical essays, and reported pieces from at home and abroad. He was the magazine’s art critic from 1987 to 1995, and the Paris correspondent from 1995 to 2000. Adam has received three National Magazine awards for essays and for criticism, the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting, and the Canadian National Magazine Award Gold Medal for arts writing. In March of 2013, he was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

An international bestselling author, Adam's newest book is All That Happiness Is (2024). His numerous earlier books include: The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery (2023); A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventures of Liberalism (2019), In Mid-Air, Points of View from Over a Decade (2018); At The Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York (2017); The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food (2012); Winter: Five Windows on the Season (2011); Angels And Ages: A Short Book About Lincoln, Darwin And Modern Life (2009); Through The Children’s Gate: A Home in New York (2007); and Paris To The Moon (2000). Adam has also written two children’s adventure books: The King’s Window (2005) and The Steps Across the Water (2010).

In 2011, Adam delivered the prestigious Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Massey Lectures. In addition to the Massey series, his more formal and extended lectures have included the New York Public Library/Oxford University Press lectures in New York; the Phillips Lecture in Washington and the Whitney Lecture in New York, and the Shapiro Lectures at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In 2006, he also hosted and presented an hour-long film about New York, Lighting Up New York, for the BBC in London.

He is also engaged in many musical projects, working both as a lyricist and libretto writer. His first musical, The Most Beautiful Room In New York, written in collaboration with the composer David Shire, opened May 2017 at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven.

Adam work has been anthologized many times, in Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Sports Writing, Best American Food Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing. He still often writes from Paris for the New Yorker, has edited the anthology Americans In Paris for the Library of America, and has written a number of introductions to new editions of works by Maupassant, Balzac, Proust, Victor Hugo and Alain-Fournier. In January of 2021, he was named a chevalier of the Legion D’Honneur, France’s highest civilian and military award, by President Emmanuel Macron.

Adam was born in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal. He received his BA. in Art History from McGill University, before completing his graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He lives in New York with his wife, filmmaker Martha Parker, and their two children, Luke Auden and Olivia Esme Claire.