Dan Barry is a longtime reporter and columnist for The New York Times. He is the author of five books, including This Land: America, Lost and Found, a collection of his national columns for The Times that was published in 2018.
Biography
Barry, whose father was from Brooklyn and whose mother was from County Galway, Ireland, was born in Queens, N.Y., and raised in Deer Park, N.Y. He graduated from St. Anthony's High School in 1976, when it was an all-boys high school in Smithtown, N.Y. His experiences at St. Anthony's figure in his memoir, Pull Me Up. He graduated from St. Bonaventure University in 1980 with a bachelor's degree in mass communications and received a master's degree in journalism from New York University. In 1983, after years working as a delicatessen clerk and ditch digger, Barry joined The Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn., as a reporter, and moved to the Providence Journal-Bulletin in 1987. In 1992, he won a shared Polk Award for investigating the causes of a state banking crisis. In 1994, he was part of a Journal-Bulletin investigative team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting after exposing corruption in the Rhode Islandcourt system. Barry joined The New York Times in 1995. He served as Long Island bureau chief, police bureau chief, City Hall bureau chief, and general assignment reporter for the Metropolitan desk before resurrecting the "About New York column" in 2003. Then, in 2007, he began the "This Land" column, which took him to all 50 states over the course of a decade. He now specializes in long-form narratives. His writing also appears in several non-fiction anthologies.
Personal life
Barry lives in Maplewood, NJ, with his wife, Mary Trinity, and two daughters, Nora and Grace.
In May 2016, Barry was given an honorary doctorate by his alma mater, St. Bonaventure University, after which he delivered the commencement address for the graduating class of 2016.
