Bob Greene is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who has been offering his quick observations and pithy descriptions of the world since he wrote his first column in high school in 1964. Currently syndicated in more than two hundred newspapers in the United States, Greene regularly produces work that reflects the thoughts and emotions of everyday Americans. Since he became a columnist--first for the Chicago Sun-Times in 1971, then for the Chicago Tribune in 1978--he estimates that he has written between four thousand and five thousand columns about the famous and the infamous, beginnings and endings, birth and death, and happiness and sadness.

Robert Bernard Greene Jr. was born on 10 March 1947 in Columbus, Ohio, the eldest son of Robert Bernard and Phyllis Ann Harmon Greene. His father was a business executive with the Bron-Shoe Company; his mother was a homemaker for a family that included Greene's sister, Debby, and...