Some friends and I were talking about authors we’ve read, and the name David Sedaris came up. That reminded me of another essayist who was big a couple of decades before Sedaris. He, like Sedaris, was an essayist who wrote sometimes-humorous, usually-heartfelt essays about mundane topics; like Sedaris but without the snark. I’m pretty sure he was a columnist for a Chicago paper, perhaps the Sun-Times, but he also authored several books, compilations of his essays. I imagine the bulk of his output would have been in the 70s and 80s.
The only name we could come up with was Mike Royko, but I’m not convinced he’s the guy. The guy I’m thinking of had a much more mundane name, like Bob Green or something.
Could well have been Bob Greene. He was a columnist for the Tribune from the late '70s, until being dismissed in 2002, when it came out that he had a sexual relationship with a high school student, who had worked with Greene on one of her school projects.
Greene wrote several books, in addition to his Tribune columns, and what you describe sounds like his writing style.
Funny. I got it right from the subject before opening the thread. He was a pretty big name around here and I think he had national attention, as well. I even have a book of his sitting on the piano right now.
He did. He used to appear on David Letterman’s show regularly, and his Wikipedia entry says that he had a commentary slot on ABC’s Nightline for a time.
In the 1980s, his column was syndicated in a lot of midwestern newspapers; the St. Louis P-D and Indianapolis Star, IIRC. As such, he was an influencer before the term was coined. Because of him, there was briefly a run on Canfield’s Chocolate Soda (bleechh), he was partially responsible for the early popularity of Vanna White, and I believe he was entirely responsible for the “Elvis is Alive” phenomena. Seriously: a woman wrote to him and included a muffled cassette recording, supposedly of Elvis’s voice, and he went into detail about it. His tone was “Jeez, what a whack-job,” but then other people wrote in, supporting her story, and he printed those letters! This was in 1987, again IIRC, but if you can prove an earlier account of someone claiming that Elvis was alive, and from a source other than Greene, please do share.
And then there was that bag-boy saga. My mom was hooked on that, and laughed herself sick, but I (like a lot of people) always stopped reading at “An envelope has been delivered to my office…”