This week, Ira spoke with Richard Zoglin.
Richard Zoglin, author of “Hope…Entertainer of the Century” (Simon & Schuster, 2014), talks about the legendary entertainer in this comprehensive biography.
Zoglin has spent more than 30 years as an editor and writer at TIME Magazine. After joining as a staff writer in 1983, he served as the magazine’s television critic for more than a decade — reviewing hundreds of TV shows, examining media coverage of such news events as the first Gulf War, and writing cover stories on David Letterman, Bill Cosby, Diane Sawyer, Arsenio Hall and Star Trek, among others.
He later became a senior editor and assistant managing editor for both the magazine and its website, Time.com, and is currently TIME’s theater critic. His first book, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America (Bloomsbury, 2008), is considered the definitive history of that seminal era in stand-up comedy.
Zoglin began his journalism career in San Francisco as a copy editor for Saturday Review magazine, before moving to New York, where he worked as a magazine editor and freelance writer, contributing articles to the New York Times, Village Voice, New Republic and other publications. In 1978 he moved to Atlanta to become television critic for the Atlanta Constitution. He left in 1982 to help launch Time Inc.’s new television magazine, TV-Cable Week, before joining TIME.
Zoglin graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley with a B. A. in English, and also earned a master of journalism degree at Berkeley. He is a native of Kansas City, Mo. His late wife, Charla Krupp, was a magazine editor, Today show contributor, and author of the bestselling books How Not to Look Old and How to Never Look Fat Again.
