Bill Barich has written many articles and several books of nonfiction based on his personal experiences and observations. His powerful reporting skills, evident throughout his work, show most clearly when he documents his most personal passions--from observing horses racing at a track to characterizing the varied, colorful individuals who inhabit the state of California--as he does in his book Big Dreams: Into the Heart of California (1994). Most of Barich's articles have been written for The New Yorker magazine. His writing often presents in dramatic form his ceaseless search for some kind of meaning in what often appears to him a cruel and often absurd world.

Barich was born in Winona, Minnesota, on 23 August 1943 to Russell and Lois Barich. The oldest of three children, Barich moved with his parents to Westbury, New York, in 1950. He grew up in the 1950s "in a suburb of ordinary tract houses," as he...