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Dave Barry Books In Order

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Publication Order of Peter and the Starcatchers Books

with Ridley Pearson
Peter and the Starcatchers(2004)Description / Buy at Amazon
Peter and the Shadow Thieves(2006)Description / Buy at Amazon
Peter and the Secret of Rundoon(2007)Description / Buy at Amazon
Peter and the Sword of Mercy(2009)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Bridge to Never Land(2011)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Never Land Books

with Ridley Pearson
Escape from the Carnivale(2006)Description / Buy at Amazon
Cave of the Dark Wind(2007)Description / Buy at Amazon
Blood Tide(2008)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Class Trip/The Worst Books

The Worst Class Trip Ever(2015)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Worst Night Ever(2016)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Big Trouble(1999)Description / Buy at Amazon
Tricky Business(2002)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog(2006)Description / Buy at Amazon
Science Fair (With: Ridley Pearson)(2008)Description / Buy at Amazon
Lunatics (With: Alan Zweibel)(2012)Description / Buy at Amazon
Insane City(2013)Description / Buy at Amazon
Plane of Thought(2017)Description / Buy at Amazon
Swamp Story(2023)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

The Taming of the Screw(1983)Description / Buy at Amazon
Babies and Other Hazards of Sex(1984)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry's Stay Fit and Healthy Until You're Dead(1985)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry's Bad Habits: A 100% Fact-Free Book(1985)Description / Buy at Amazon
Claw Your Way to the Top(1987)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry's Greatest Hits(1988)Description / Buy at Amazon
Homes and Other Black Holes(1988)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States(1989)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry Turns Forty(1990)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry Talks Back(1991)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need(1991)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry Does Japan(1992)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up(1994)Description / Buy at Amazon
The World According to Dave Barry(1994)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry's Gift Guide To End All Gift Guides(1994)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys(1995)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry in Cyberspace(1996)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry is from Mars and Venus(1997)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs(1997)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry Turns Fifty(1998)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down(2000)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Greatest Invention In The History Of Mankind Is Beer(2001)Description / Buy at Amazon
My Teenage Son's Goal In Life Is To Make Me Feel 3,500 Years Old(2001)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway(2001)Description / Buy at Amazon
Boogers are My Beat: More Lies, But Some Actual Journalism(2003)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry's Money Secrets: Why is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar?(2006)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry on Dads(2007)Description / Buy at Amazon
Dave Barry's History of the Millennium(2007)Description / Buy at Amazon
I'll Mature When I'm Dead(2010)Description / Buy at Amazon
You Can Date Boys When You're Forty(2014)Description / Buy at Amazon
Live Right and Find Happiness(2015)Description / Buy at Amazon
Best. State. Ever.(2016)Description / Buy at Amazon
For This We Left Egypt? (With: Alan Zweibel,Adam Mansbach)(2017)Description / Buy at Amazon
Lessons From Lucy(2019)Description / Buy at Amazon
A Field Guide to the Jewish People (With: Alan Zweibel,Adam Mansbach)(2019)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Short Story Anthologies

San Francisco Stories (By: John Miller)(1990)Description / Buy at Amazon
Los Angeles Stories (By: John Miller)(1991)Description / Buy at Amazon
On Suicide: Great Writers on the Ultimate Question (By: William Shakespeare,Virginia Woolf,Ambrose Bierce,Leo Tolstoy,Graham Greene,Langston Hughes,Emily Dickinson,John Donne,Plato,Jorge Luis Borges,Gustave Flaubert,Robert Coles,Walker Percy,Albert Camus,Cynthia Ozick,William Styron,Dorothy Parker,Sylvia Plath,Primo Levi,Phillip Lopate,John Miller,Genevieve Anderson,Alfred Alvarez,Émile Durkheim,Howard I. Kushner)(1992)Description / Buy at Amazon
New Orleans Stories (By: John Miller,Genevieve Anderson)(1992)Description / Buy at Amazon
Chicago Stories (By: Stuart Dybek,John Miller)(1993)Description / Buy at Amazon
Southwest Stories (By: D.H. Lawrence,Alison Moore,Barry Gifford,Sandra Cisneros,Larry McMurtry,Sam Shepard,Leslie Marmon Silko,C.G. Jung,John Miller,Georgia O'Keefe)(1993)Description / Buy at Amazon
Florida Stories (With: Elmore Leonard,Ernest Hemingway,John D. MacDonald,Damon Runyon,Isaac Bashevis Singer,Nathaniel Hawthorne,Stephen Crane,Zora Neale Hurston,Elizabeth Bishop,Tennessee Williams,Alison Lurie,Wallace Stevens,John Sayles,John James Audubon,Joy Williams,Joan Didion,John Miller,KirstenMiller,William Bartram)(1993)Description / Buy at Amazon
Lust: Lascivious Love Stories and Passionate Poems (By: John Miller,KirstenMiller)(1994)Description / Buy at Amazon
Alaska Stories (By: John Miller,KirstenMiller)(1995)Description / Buy at Amazon
Texas Stories (By: John Miller,KirstenMiller)(1995)Description / Buy at Amazon
San Francisco Thrillers (By: Tim Smith,John Miller)(1995)Description / Buy at Amazon
Cape Cod Stories (By: Tim Smith,John Miller)(2002)Description / Buy at Amazon
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OOB: Anthology series. The author will have written at least one story in this series.

Publication Order of Troll Target Books

with Geoffrey C. Ward, Miriam Rinn
Together: How We Belong(1997)Description / Buy at Amazon

Publication Order of Anthologies

+ Click to View all Anthologies

Born in 1947 in Armonk, New York, David McAlister Barry became famous as Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry. His column first appeared in the Herald in 1983, was widely syndicated by 1985, and won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1988. Many individual articles from the column were reprinted in Barry’s books.
Barry contributed humor pieces to the school newspaper and was elected “class clown” at Pleasantville High school in 1965. He earned a degree in English from Haverford College in 1969. As a student, he wrote for the Haverford News, where he later claimed to have been allowed to submit humor columns “”based loosely on my concept of what I would have found if I had done actual research” for news assignments.

His next job was writing for the West Chester (Pennsylvania) Daily Local News, where he said he was required to write ordinary, non-humorous news coverage of local government meetings between 1971 and 1974. Between 1974 and 1983 he worked as an English teacher and wrote short occasional articles.

Barry has published little about his personal life in the 1970’s. His first marriage didn’t last long. After attending a church-sponsored college and being exempt from military service in Vietnam on religious grounds, he chose to write from a non-religious viewpoint, explaining that anything written from a religious perspective risks “offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.” He also described his political position as critical of anyone in office. His second marriage lasted from 1976 to 1993.

In 1981, Barry’s witty yet sensitive article about the birth of his son was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Gene Weingarten, a Miami Herald editor and humorist, recognized Barry’s talent and offered him steady work in 1983.

Barry was quickly branded as America’s funniest living writer. Almost all of his collected columns and independent humor books became instant best sellers. He was invited to contribute articles to magazines from Boating to Reader’s Digest, and is featured in book-length anthologies like Pulling Our Own Strings, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Best American Sports Writing.

Probably as a joke, Barry has called his column’s promotion of “International Talk Like a Pirate Day,” observed on September 19, his greatest achievement.

Between 1992 and 2012, Dave Barry was also the lead guitarist in a band called the Rock Bottom Remainders. The band consisted of successful authors who had been less successful musicians, including Mitch Albom, Roy Blount Jr., Matt Groening, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Ridley Pearson, Amy Tan, Scott Turow, and sometimes others. Despite occasional assists from Bruce Springsteen, Warren Zevon, and other successful musicians, Barry described the Remainders as “not musically skilled, but extremely loud.”

In 1996, Barry married Miami Herald sports writer Michelle Kaufman; their daughter was born in 2000.

A short-lived television series based on Barry’s columns, called “Dave’s World,” featured Harry Anderson as Dave Barry, with cameo appearances by Barry himself. A more successful movie was made from his novel Big Trouble. The 1999 novel became a 2002 movie starring Tim Allen, Rene Russo, and Patrick Warburton. Barry’s 1996 book, Dave Barry’s Guide to Guys, was made into a 2005 film, Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys.

In 2004, Barry retired from writing regular columns. He continued writing books, a blog, and occasional feature articles.

Writings

Although fatherhood and teaching have been frequent themes in all Barry’s writing, aging or resisting the aging process seem to be even more inspiring. He consistently maintained an “immature little boy” fascination with wacky facts and gross-out jokes; one book is titled Boogers Are My Beat, and another is I’ll Mature When I’m Dead. He also accepted the job of rewriting the Hollywood legend based loosely on James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Although Barrie’s main characters are children who don’t get older, the literary voice in Peter Pan and Wendy and Peter Pan in Kensington Garden had become unbearably dated to many young readers and their parents. In Barry’s series, Peter and his friends have many additional adventures that make their story fresher, funnier, more satisfying to contemporary audiences, and full of potential for fresh new movies.

Dave Barry did not actually invent the phrase “I am not making this up,” but the wacky facts in his early columns prompted him to use it so regularly that one of his collections was titled Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up.

Barry is capable of writing seriously; he wrote a serious column in 1992, when his son was treated for injuries, and a few more in 2001 after the attacks on New York and Washington. However, when a reader suggested that he “mature” into serious journalism, Barry’s reply became the title of his next collection, Boogers Are My Beat. In other words, readers expected his writing to feature bizarre and grotesque news events, often involving explosions. His Guide to Guys distinguished “guys” from “women,” characterized as serious and empathetic, and “Real Men,” serious and tough; “guys” are more interested in games, gross-outs, and goofiness. He identified himself as a “guy” in 1996 and refused to “mature” in subsequent years.

Maintaining his “guy” image, although Barry’s novels for adults sold well, Barry has written more novels edited for teen and even pre-teen audiences. (His writing has a certain multi-generational appeal; adults read The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog, and teenagers read Big Trouble, Tricky Business, and Insane City.) His novels typically start with chains of events that seem completely unrelated until they crash into each other in a plausible, yet bizarre, climactic scene.

Another of the most popular themes in Barry’s columns was rock music. Columns on this theme grew into Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs. Another was what a fan described as “gift items that people would rather laugh about the idea of getting than actually get.” Columns on this theme grew into Dave Barry’s Gift Guide to End All Gift Guides, which, of course, grew into an annual feature at the Miami Herald web site.

Although Dave Barry in Cyberspace chronicled Barry’s early mistakes and reservations about online self-publishing, after retiring from regular column writing he published a popular blog through the Miami Herald. The blog has displayed some of Barry’s vintage columns, some of his occasional writing, many links to grotesque news stories (often featuring explosions) supplied by his friends, relatively few promotions of his books, and, of course, continuous promotion of the online version of the Herald. Barry’s fans in cyberspace never needed to miss an annual gift guide, “Year in Review,” book review, or other feature article written as only Dave Barry can write it. The Herald kept us posted on the writings of Barry’s old friends, such as Gene Weingarten and Joel Achenbach, as well.

Book Series In Order » Authors » Dave Barry

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