William Finnegan
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William Finnegan (1952- ), a staff writer at The New Yorker. Finnegan was born in New York City in 1952. He was raised in Los Angeles and Hawaii, and graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1974 with a degree in English literature. He spent the next four years taking seasonal jobs and working on an MFA in creative writing at the University of Montana. Finnegan then spent four years abroad, traveling in Asia, Australia, and Africa. He supported himself with freelance travel writing and other odd jobs, but upon reaching Cape Town, South Africa, Finnegan was in need of a job. He found a position as an English teacher at Grassy Park High School, a school for black students. Finnegan’s teaching experience coincided with a nationwide school boycott, giving him fodder for his first book, Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid, which was published in 1986.
Finnegan’s experience in South Africa transformed him from a novelist to a political journalist. His first short piece, about his experience living in Sri Lanka, was published in Mother Jones in 1979. Finnegan began contributing to The New Yorker in 1984 and has been a staff writer there since 1987. He has also contributed to Harper’s and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.
Finnegan contributed a two-part series for the New Yorker in 1992 entitled "Playing Doc's Games." A surfer himself, Finnegan writes about the local surf scene in San Francisco revolving around Ocean Beach and Dr. Mark Renneker ("Doc") as well as Finnegan's own personal experiences. A remarkable piece of writing, it is widely considered to be one of the best pieces of journalism on surfing.
Finnegan’s next two books grew out of assignments for The New Yorker. In 1986, he was sent to Johannesburg, where he followed black reporters who gathered information for white reporters. This led to the 1988 publication of Dateline Soweto: Travels with Black South African Reporters. A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique, published in 1992, grew out of a series of correspondences about the war-torn nation for the magazine. 1998 saw the publication of Finnegan’s most recent work, Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country, which deals with the bleak lives of American teenagers in spite of the United States’ economic affluence.
Finnegan currently resides in New York with his wife and daughter.
Finnegan's younger brother, Michael Finnegan, is a national political correspondent for The Los Angeles Times.
