David Hajdu

Music critic

David Hajdu is the music critic for TNR and a professor of arts journalism at Columbia. He has been writing on music of all sorts, as well as other subjects, for more than thirty years. He is the author of three books of narrative nonfiction and and one collection of essays, most of which appeared originally in TNR: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996), Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (2001), The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008), and Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (2009). He has won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music writing multiple times and has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award. His articles and essays have appeared in the Best Music Writing, Best American Magazine Writing, and other anthologies. Hajdu is married to the singer Karen Oberlin, and he and his family live in New York City.