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Patrick Jake O'Rourke was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1947 to a car dealer and his wife. P.J. began his life as a Republican, but during the '60s changed politics to conform with the rest of the country's youth. P.J. says, however, that he was never a Democrat:" I went from being a Republican to being a Maoist, then back to being a Republican again." P.J. attended Miami of University of Ohio, majoring in English, and then went on to Johns Hopkins.
After school he worked on small newspapers in Manhattan and Baltimore. In 1972, P.J. Went to work at National Lampoon, where he became editor-in-chief in 1978. He ws responsible for the high school yearbook parody and the Dacron (Ohio) Republican-Democrat newspaper parody, among other things. By 1980, P.J. felt a little too mature for the Lampoon so he moved to Hollywood and wrote scripts. One of the screenplays he worked on was Rodney Dangerfield's Easy Money. Soon afterwards he returned East, to New York, where he joined Rolling Stone.
Since that time and in addition to his current position as Foreign Affairs Editor for Rolling Stone, P.J. has written for everything from Esquire to Car and Driver. In addition to praise from The Wall Street Journal and Time, he has been cheered by sources ranging from Richard Nixon to Vogue (which named him "one of the five men you'd most want to sit next to at a dinner party"). His best sellers include Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut, All the Trouble in the World, Parliament of Whores, Give War a Chance, Republican Party Reptile, Holiday's in Hell, Modern Manners, and the recently re-released Bachelors' Home Companion.
Although P.J.'s persona is that of a hard-bitten, cigar smoking conservative (making him unique among satirists), he tends to bash all the politicos. Or to put it in his own words: "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
P.J. divides his time between Washington, D.C. and New Hampshire, and is a H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute.
Courtesy of: http://www.buildfreedom.com/tribute/o'rourke/bio.html
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