Thrown Under the Omnibus ─ A Reader

P.J. O’Rourke has had a prolific career as one of America’s most celebrated humorists. But that career almost didn’t happen. As he tells it, ?I began to write for pay in the spring of 1970. To tell the truth I didn’t even mean to be a writer, I meant to be a race car driver, but I didn’t have a race car.”

Fortunately for us, he had to settle for writing. From his early pieces for the National Lampoon, through his classic reporting as Rolling Stone’s International Affairs editor in the 80s and 90s, and his brilliant, inimitable political journalism and analysis, P.J. has been entertaining and provoking readers with high octane prose, a gonzo Republican attitude and a rare ability to make you laugh out loud. Chris Buckley once described his work as ?S.J. Perlman on acid” and when Penguin first published its Dictionary of Modern Humorist Quotations PJ had more entries than any living writer.

For the first time Thrown Under the Omnibus brings together his funniest, most outrageous, most controversial and most loved pieces in the definitive P.J. reader. Handpicked and introduced by the humorist himself, Thrown Under the Omnibus is the essential P.J. O’Rourke anthology.

P. J. O’Rourke was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, and attended Miami University and Johns Hopkins. He began writing funny things in 1960s underground” newspapers, became editor-in-chief of National Lampoon, then spent 20 years reporting for Rolling Stone and The Atlantic Monthly as the world’s only trouble-spot humorist, going to wars, riots, rebellions, and other Holidays in Hell” in more than 40 countries. He’s written 16 books on subjects as diverse as politics and cars and etiquette and economics. His book about Washington, Parliament of Whores, and his book about international conflict and crisis, Give War a Chance, both reached #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. He is a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard, H. L. Mencken fellow at the Cato Institute, a member of the editorial board of World Affairs and a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. He lives with his family in rural New England, as far away from the things he writes about as he can get.