Adventures in the Scribblers Trade : The Most Fun You Can Have

Neil Hickey was a twenty-four year old job seeker when he heard the editor of a major magazine call journalism "the most fun you can have, standing up."

The young reporter had already come to that conclusion independently after working his way through college as a Baltimore newspaperman. He'd go on to spend more than a half century meeting movie stars, musicians, and some of the most powerful people in Washington as he honed his craft.

Now an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Hickey shares an insider's view of pop culture, war, oppression, and even happenings beyond our solar system.

Meeting astronaut Neil Armstrong trumped interviews with presidents of the United States, secretaries of state past and present, and Nobel Prize winners. In Singapore, his assignment was to serve as a judge for the Miss Universe contest.

Whether it's chatting with President Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter, traveling with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger or investigating the Challenger spacecraft disaster, Hickey shares deep insights into American culture, the nature of war, and the art of journalism in Adventures in the Scribblers Trade.

Neil Hickey is a veteran writer and editor on newspapers and magazines. He began his journalistic career in Baltimore and resumed it in New York after three years as a naval officer aboard a destroyer during and after the Korean war. Reporting assignments have taken him to Vietnam, the 1991 war in Kuwait, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany during the Soviet period), Cuba, the Baltics, Northern Ireland, Singapore, and around the U.S. He served as the New York bureau chief of the original TV Guide, at that time the country's best-selling magazine. He is former editor-at-large of the Columbia Journalism Review and now serves as adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in New York City and Putnam County, N.Y