David Sheff

Renowned journalist David Sheff is the author of Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey through His Son’s Addiction, the book that has topped the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. In it, he tells the story of his harrowing struggle to help his son Nic overcome his methamphetamine addiction from the father’s and family’s point of view. Through Beautiful Boy, he brings immediacy to the emotional rollercoaster of loving a child who seems beyond your help.

The book is based on Sheff’s article “My Addicted Son,” which appeared in the New York Times Magazine. It won a special award for Outstanding Contribution to Advancing the Understanding of Addictions from the American Psychological Association and inspired (and continues to inspire) hundreds of letters from readers, many of whom are suffering from addiction or the addiction of a loved one. His continues to research and writing about this subject and most recently contributed to the HBO book Addiction: Why Can’t They Just Stop.

Along with The New York Times Magazine, Sheff, a contributing editor to Playboy, has also written for The New York Times, Wired, Fortune, Rolling Stone, Outside, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Esquire and Observer Magazine in England, Foreign Literature in Russia, and Playboy (Shueisha) in Japan. He has conducted seminal interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, nuclear physicist Ted Taylor, Congressman Barney Frank, Steve Jobs, Ansel Adams, Thomas Friedman, the founders of Google, Tom Hanks, Betty Friedan, Keith Haring, Jack Nicholson, Carl Sagan, Larry Ellison, Salman Rushdie, and others. He also wrote an award-winning documentary about John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and a radio special about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, both for National Public Radio, and wrote and edited Heart Play: Unfinished Dialogue, which won a Grammy Award nomination for Best Spoken Word Recording of 1984.

Sheff is the author of Game Over, called “the bible of the videogame industry,” by The Wall Street Journal that also earned great praised from Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Forbes, USA Today, and The New York Review of Books. He is also the author of the book China Dawn about the Internet revolution in China that has been described in the Wall Street Journal as “the story of an insurgency, and a momentous one.” All We Are Saying, based on Sheff’s interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1980, was a Literary Guild Selection book. The Times called it, "A fascinating, detailed glimpse into the workings of a musical genius” and People said it was “the most revealing portrait of John Lennon’s career.”

Sheff has been an editor of New West and California magazines and was a founding editor of Men’s Life and Yahoo Internet Life.