Veteran journalist Bryan Gruley (born November 1957) is the Chicago Bureau Chief of The Wall Street Journal and author of the novel, Starvation Lake.
Starvation Lake is the first in a new mystery series set in a fictional northern Michigan town. It was published in March 2009 by Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly calls the novel “one of those books that won’t shake its grip. Bryan Gruley is off to a phenomenal start.”
As chief of the Journal's Chicago bureau, Gruley runs a group of reporters who write about agriculture, food companies, restaurants, supermarkets, airlines, manufacturing, pharmacies, health care and the economy and culture of the Midwest.
Previously, Gruley was a senior editor in the Journal's Washington bureau, where he helped reporters write difficult stories for Page One, and wrote some himself, on a wide variety of financial and non-financial subjects.
He wrote one of the front page stories on Sept. 11, 2001, that won the Journal a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News as well as the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Jesse Laventhol prize for newswriting. Gruley's Nov. 25, 2003, story, “War Stories,” about a black Army lieutenant and the Holocaust victim he saved, was an alternate finalist for a Pulitzer in feature writing.
Gruley joined the Journal in September 1995 as a reporter covering antitrust and telecommunications, and for two years managed a group of reporters who covered regulatory issues. He was a friend of Daniel Pearl, the Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in February 2002. Gruley wrote and recorded a song, “For A Son,” for Pearl’s then-unborn son, Adam.
Prior to the Journal, Gruley worked for 11 years as a reporter at The Detroit News, covering business, including the auto industry and the Detroit newspapers' effort to get a joint operating agreement. His coverage of the latter resulted in a prize-winning book, Paper Losses: A Modern Epic of Greed and Betrayal at America's Two Largest Newspaper Companies (Grove Atlantic, 1993).
The native of Detroit also has worked at the Kalamazoo Gazette; the Livingston County Daily Press & Argus in Howell, Mich.; the Argus in Brighton, Mich.; and the Antrim County News in Bellaire, Mich. He is a 1979 graduate of the University of Notre Dame. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Pam. They have three grown children, Joel, Kaitlin and Danielle.