A Devil's Dictionary of Business

Nicholas von Hoffman was born in New York City on October 16, 1929. After graduating from Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx in 1948, he took a research job at the University of Chicago. In 1954, he became a field organizer in black and Hispanic communities on the South Side. He started his journalism career in 1963 at The Chicago Sun-Times. He wrote for The Washington Post from 1966 to 1976. After leaving The Post, he wrote syndicated freelance columns for King Features, wrote book reviews and magazine articles for The Times, and contributed to numerous publications including The New Republic, Esquire, Vogue, The Nation, Harper's, and The New York Review of Books.

In the early 1970s, he was a commentator on the Point/Counterpoint segment of the CBS program 60 Minutes. He was fired in 1974 for remarks he made about President Richard Nixon. He broadcast 250 commentaries on public affairs in the 1980s for the syndicated radio program Byline. He wrote columns for the weekly newspaper The New York Observer from 1993 to 2008 and contributed to Architectural Digest from 1996 to 2007. He also composed the libretto for Deborah Drattell's 2003 production of Nicholas and Alexandra by the Los Angeles Opera.

His first book, Mississippi Notebook, was published in 1964. His other nonfiction books included Multiversity, We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against, Citizen Cohn, Hoax: Why Americans Are Suckered by White House Lies, and Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky. He wrote two novels entitled Organized Crimes and Two, Three, Many More. He also collaborated with Garry B. Trudeau on The Fireside Watergate and Tales from the Margaret Mead Taproom. von Hoffman died from kidney failure on February 1, 2018 at the age of 88.

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