Teddy Wayne
Teddy Wayne (born 1979) is an American novelist and short story writer whose books include "The Love Song of Jonny Valentine" (2013) and "Loner" (2016). He is a frequent contributor to "The New Yorker", "McSweeney's", and many other publications. Biography. Wayne was raised in New York in a secular humanist household; he has Jewish ancestry. After graduating from Harvard University in 2001, he received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis in 2007. During graduate school, Wayne began writing a novel about a Qatarian computer programmer whose moral code is  challenged when he joins a Wall Street investment firm. Published in 2010 as "Kapitoil", the book received critical acclaim. His novel "The Love Song of Jonny Valentine", about the public meltdown of a Justin Bieber-like 11-year-old pop star, was published in 2013. Wayne has said that the book was partly inspired by the vulnerability he felt after publishing his first novel, explaining, "I started wondering, how do actual celebrities deal with it? If I’m getting this worked up over a bad Amazon review, how would you deal with the tabloids?” He researched "Jonny Valentine" by poring  over celebrity magazines and reading biographies of former child stars such as Jackie Coogan, Tatum O'Neal, and Drew Barrymore. His 2016 campus novel "Loner" tells the story of David Federman, a Harvard freshmen and a victim of toxic masculinity who begins stalking one of his female classmates. HBO announced plans to produce a television series based on "Loner" in 2019, with Wayne attached to write the pilot and co-executive produce the series. In 2020, Wayne published "Apartment", a novel about the complicated friendship between two male writers who meet while attending Columbia University's MFA program in 1996. Wayne  is currently working on his fifth novel, about "a New Yorker on the edges of bourgeois society, critical of everything around him." Wayne lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the writer Kate Greathead, and their two children. From 2014 to 2018, he wrote a column about technology titled "Future Tense" for "The New York Times"'s Style section.