About the Author

First time in years I did a written résumé meant to be more than a teaser:

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

R. F. Laird emerged on the literary scene with the publication of The Boomer Bible in 1991. It has enjoyed a long and controversial history (88,000 copies sold), as has its reclusive creator. At the time of its release, the 880 page work was announced by The Wall Street Journal as “a sprawling, wickedly funny rewriting of the Bible meant to sum up a generation.” The San Francisco Chronicle hailed it as “One of the oddest, darkest, funniest, smartest and most innovative books to come along in years.” In the same month, the book editor of the New York Times informed the publisher’s publicist that “the Times will never review The Boomer Bible.” And thus began the complicated writing career of the Jersey boy who graduated from Harvard at the age of 19 and got himself banned from American book publishing with his second, even more controversial manuscript, a mock nonfiction work satirizing feminism, social science, and recently divorced American men. All the editors saw was a grotesque insult to women. The original manuscript of The Naked Woman, lost somewhere in the hands of multiple agents and dozens of book editors, has since been reconstructed (mostly), augmented with later material, and is available at Amazon.com.

 

Laird is also prolific and diverse in his output. His works include 22 books available through Amazon and/or Kindle, including a 600-page novel(?) called Punk City about a fictional “punk writing movement” in 1980s Philadelphia, two books of political and cultural essays, a memoir of life with sighthounds and other critters in rural New Jersey, a history of his grandfather’s service with the illustrious Rainbow Division in WWI, a collection of reviews of American movies about America, a survival guide for women confronting physical assault in the absence of outside assistance, a book of poetry, and a collection of short stories demonstrating his rapid stylistic development in his early twenties.

 

Two of his most significant works, however, are not books but multimedia creations on the Internet. Shuteye Town 1999 is a place made of 3,500+ computer graphics drawn on-screen by Laird himself and navigated via non-deterministic hyperlink choices by the ‘reader,’ who must find his way through a world confined to the closing seconds of the 20th Century. ST99 has three subway lines, a mall with more than 30 stores, multiple viewable television stations, a university, a red light district, housing developments, functioning vending machines, an airport, police, a court and prison system, professional sports teams, and its own version of the Internet — a place you enter and travel through called the Undernet. There is also a companion to Shuteye Town called Shuteye Nation, a place made more of words than pictures, including newspapers and magazines, gazetteers, a Glossary reminiscent of Bierce’s Devil Dictionary, a set of Who’s Who entries for famous “Amerians,” and its own cable news programs. Both these works have their own websites and are free to visit. As is a site with working hyperlinks called TheBoomerBible.com.

 

In other parts of his life, Laird was an international management consultant with multiple Fortune 100 clients, including General Motors and Whirlpool Corporation. (He has been published as a ‘ghost’ for a Fortune CEO by the Harvard Business Review.) Areas of business in which he has consulted and written everything from videos to technical articles to training programs to executive speeches include the office information systems industry, Just-in-Time Manufacturing, internal corporate communication systems (won an award from a major industry group for “best internal communication periodical of the year”), and process-oriented Continuous Improvement systems. After extensive travel involving four continents, he retired to his home county in New Jersey and worked since as a freelance corporate writer and a personal blogger on dozens of subjects. He still works 6 to 12 hours a day, in the delightful company of his wife, a feisty border terrier, and four tolerant cats.

 

He has remained controversial, suspended and censored multiple times by Facebook, still at bat with two “strikes” at his audio/video YouTube Channel, and the survivor of a blizzard of hate mail and death threats he received for a FB post he wrote in response to Obama’s call for “honest discussions about race in America.” Like the rest of his work, that post has never been deleted or repudiated by Robert Laird.