Rick Bayan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Richard Paul Bayan (born January 27, 1950) is a U.S. author, webmaster and advertising copywriter, best known for his advertising thesaurus Words That Sell, his trenchant satirical lexicon, The Cynic's Dictionary, and his darkly humorous online essays.
The son of Armenian immigrants from Istanbul, Bayan was born and raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He earned his B.A. from Rutgers College, where he majored in history and graduated with honors. Finding himself virtually unemployable, he added a Master's in journalism from the University of Illinois.
Bayan briefly worked as a staff writer at Time-Life Books. His first essays, The Liberal Artist at Leisure and The Liberal Artist at Work, appeared in National Review in 1976-77. While working as chief copywriter at Barron's Educational Series from 1978 to 1985, Bayan authored Words That Sell [1](1984, revised 2006), an advertising and marketing thesaurus that became a standard reference work in its field.
From 1985 through 1999 Bayan served as copy chief at Day-Timers, Inc.[2] There he won six advertising awards and wrote his first book of humor, The Cynic's Dictionary[3] (1994).
Bayan created The Cynic's Sanctuary (i-cynic.com)[4] in 1996. He quit his job at Day-Timers in 1999 to write full-time, including a weekly column, Some Cynical Guy, for Upbeat Online from 2000 through 2002.
In 2001 Bayan married Anne Downey and moved to Philadelphia. There he wrote More Words That Sell[5](2003) and expanded the original Words That Sell. His first child, Guy, was born in 2004.
Bayan was profiled in Psychology Today in 2006, and a collection of his essays, tentatively titled Extremely Dark Chocolates, is due out in 2008.
