"Paul Grondahl has given us the biography that Andy deserves." -- Steve Kroft
A hilarious and heartbreaking biography of one of America's most popular commentators and beloved curmudgeons, whose biting wit and homespun humor earned him comparisons to Mark Twain and Will Rogers.
(Publication date: October 1, 2026)
About the book
Andy Rooney carries readers through the arc of a true American original and one of the country's most popular television and newspaper commentators.
Award-winning journalist and biographer Paul Grondahl's comprehensive biography traces Rooney's early transformation from smart-aleck prankster to World War II correspondent for Stars and Stripes, whose first-person wartime dispatches rivaled the reportage of Ernie Pyle, Edward R. Murrow, and Walter Cronkite. After narrowly avoiding death in the war, Rooney's early success as author and Hollywood screenwriter turned to years of rejection as a freelancer, with unfulfilled literary aspirations and financial struggles.
Eventually, he found his niche as a gag writer with Arthur Godfrey, as an essayist for Harry Reasoner's CBS News specials and, in a stroke of luck, as writer and deliverer of the wildly popular 60 Minutes segment "A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney."
The book draws on interviews with Rooney and his family members, childhood friends, and 60 Minutes colleagues, as well as archival research and abundant quotations of Rooney's own words through unpublished writings, personal letters, and pieces beloved by his legion of fans.
Along the way, Grondahl uncovers new truths about Rooney’s long-term extramarital affair, the extent of his academic failure, and how his boorish behavior alienated him from close friends. This dark side of Rooney's personality, however, is balanced by examples of deep loyalty, acts of kindness, and encouragement of young journalists.
Here is the extraordinary life story of a man who contained multitudes.
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Video interview hosted by John Gray, journalist and news anchor, WTEN-ABC
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Albany Times Union: Grondahl digs into Andy Rooney's ups and downs in new biography"
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Metroland Now: "Author Paul Grondahl uncovers Andy Rooney's lucky life in new biography"\
Advance praise
"Paul Grondahl has written the biography Andy Rooney deserved. Rooney was in his way brilliant, an American original. He was also human in the full sense of the term, which is to say complicated. A great read."
― Peter L. W. Osnos, founder of Andy Rooney’s longtime publisher PublicAffairs
"I first met Andrew in 1984 when I was hired as an assistant producer on 60 Minutes and later I became his producer, which lasted for sixteen years. In all that time I thought I knew him well, but after reading Paul Grondahl's insightful biography, I miss him even more, as will you, the reader."
― Susie Bieber, Andy Rooney’s 60 Minutes producer
"During the course of my thirty years as a 60 Minutes correspondent, the one question I was almost always asked was, 'What is Andy Rooney really like?' I always answered, 'Just like the cranky old guy you see on TV.'
It was the reason for his enormous popularity. He was real, plain spoken, and pretension free and always said exactly what was on his mind. He had a wonderfully complicated, clever mind. Now, Paul Grondahl has given us the biography that Andy deserves. He was the Will Rogers of his generation, and every week tens of millions of people invited him into their living room for a few minutes that might gin up a national conversation.
He is remembered mostly as a humorist, but he was also a philosopher, a critic, and an influential journalist, whose Peabody Award-winning CBS documentary Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington not only changed television reporting but serves as a handbook for aspiring journalists."
― Steve Kroft, former 60 Minutes correspondent
"Normally, we don't like grumpy curmudgeons. Yet for three decades Andy Rooney’s grumpy and always witty three-minute commentary at the conclusion of 60 Minutes was the most popular segment of that hit show. In this vivid biography, Paul Grondahl paints a delicious picture of this amazing character―an uncompromising man who would not bend to flatter his bosses or his audience."
― Ken Auletta, author of Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way
"Millions of Americans savored their 'Few Minutes with Andy Rooney' each week when he was the crusty fixture on CBS’s 60 Minutes―a true heir to H. L. Mencken in the peak era of network television. Paul Grondahl's superb biography is as vivid and crisp as one of Rooney's own monologues. It also makes us see that Rooney was a far-sighted innovator who did as much as any newsman of his time to create the new age of the larger-than-life media 'brand.'"
― Sam Tanenhaus, author of Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America
"Andy Rooney was my friend, but that didn’t protect me from his curmudgeoning. When we met, he delivered the mudge, and he got as good as he gave. That was his life, and it made him the most popular figure on television.
Now Paul Grondahl has written a hilariously entertaining and consequential book that zeros in marvelously on all that mudge and how it nagged him all his life with deep disappointment in not being recognized as a literary writer. Andy tried for that and failed but remained a great wit who kept us laughing and applauding his sarcasm.
I don’t know how he would’ve done at the Algonquin Round Table, but I think he was just as witty and twice as funny as some of those literary icons.
Banishing someone to literary oblivion doesn’t always work. Sometimes the joke is on the banisher. Andy is right up there with Will Rogers as a commentator who understood the secret of laughter."
― William Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed
about the author
Paul Grondahl is the Opalka Endowed Director of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany. It is the nation's premier literary series and brings dozens of acclaimed authors to Albany each year for lectures, discussions and readings.
His previous books include Mayor Corning: Albany Icon, Albany Enigma, also published by SUNY Press, and I Rose Like a Rocket: The Political Education of Theodore Roosevelt.
As a staff writer at the Albany Times Union from 1984 to 2017, he won numerous local, state, and national writing prizes, and his reporting took him from the Arctic to Antarctica; from Northern Ireland to Africa; from New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina and Haiti after its catastrophic earthquake in 2010; and across New York State, from Ground Zero on 9/11 to the Adirondack wilderness.
His in-depth newspaper projects on domestic violence, death and dying, mental illness in state prisons and the problems facing sub-Saharan Africa have won a number of local, state and national journalism awards. Read more / Contact Paul
Photo credit: Richard Lovrich
Conversation and Q&A at 7:30 p.m.
NYS Writers Institute
Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus
135 Western Avenue, Albany NY 12203
Conversation at 2 p.m.
Albany Public Library, Main Branch
161 Washington Avenue, Albany NY 12210
Presented by Friends & Foundation of the Albany Public Library.
Thursday, Oct. 29
Conversation and signing at 7:30 p.m.
Saratoga County History Center/Brookside Museum
21 Fairground Avenue
Ballston Spa NY 12020
Talk and signing at 2 p.m.
Sand Lake Center for the Arts
2880 NY-43, Averill Park NY 12018
In conversation with Bill Buell at noon. Signing to follow.
Schenectady County Library
99 Clinton St. #2, Schenectady NY 12305
Conversation and signing at 10 a.m.
Albany Guardian Society
12 Corporate Woods Blvd. 12211
Registration required for in-person or Zoom link.
Conversation and signing at 2 p.m.
Albany Institute of History & Art
125 Washington Avenue, Albany NY 12210
Conversation and signing at 6 p.m.
Guilderland Public Library
2228 Western Avenue, Guilderland NY 12084
Talk and signing at 12:15 p.m.
SUNY Adirondack, The Writers Project
Location tba
an excerpt
Andy Rooney built the desk in his office at CBS News on West Fifty-Seventh Street in Manhattan out of a three-inch-thick slab of black walnut. Its rectangular shape featured a live edge and a rounded indentation where a limb once grew. The thick slice of timber, known as a flitch, came from the trunk of an ancient walnut that fell near his country home in Rensselaerville, New York, a small town in the Helderberg Mountains thirty miles southwest of Albany, the capital city where Rooney grew up. Each summer, he traveled upstate to the rural retreat to escape the rush of New York City. It was a quiet place where he could pursue without distraction his twin passions of writing and woodworking. Both crafts required focus, perseverance, and revision. It helped to be a little stubborn and a lot ornery when it came to the idiosyncrasies of words and wood. Rooney was both.
In a woodworking shop he created in a freestanding building about the size of a two-bay garage, Rooney planed and sanded the walnut surface. The finishing work revealed a road map of grain and whorls and elemental character. Nature had left a large crack on one end, which he repaired with two snugly fitted ebony dovetails to keep it from splitting further.
It was an unadorned desk that suited the man who built a career as the country’s most famous curmudgeon. He sat day after day, month after month, year after year in a black-leather swivel desk chair behind that slab of walnut and hammered out simple declarative sentences and well-turned paragraphs. As a syndicated newspaper columnist and 60 Minutes commentator, he shaped ideas into sturdy opinions about life’s absurdities and cranky critiques about ordinary life. He drew upon a deep well of shared experience.
"I just try to put down on paper some of the thoughts that have crossed my mind because I’m average enough so they’ve probably crossed the reader’s too,” Rooney wrote in an early newspaper column. “I’m satisfied trying to quantify the obvious.” He stood up for the little guy, railed against big business, spit in the eye of charlatans, exposed phoniness, skewered pomposity, groused about everyday annoyances, and stuck to a bedrock philosophy sometimes mistaken for churlishness. He deployed humor, often of the sarcastic variety, in pithy commentaries read and watched every week by millions of Americans — and a not inconsiderable number of critics. He struck a nerve with a mass audience across three decades because he had a way of saying what was on the minds of average Americans. His friend Walter Cronkite said that Rooney “articulates all the frustrations with modern life that the rest of us Everymen (and Everywomen) suffer with silence or mumbled oaths.”
Rooney worked each weekday bending words to his will from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and for most of his career he went to the office on Saturdays, too, to meet his deadlines for three newspaper columns and one television commentary week in and week out. He positioned the desk in a corner against a back wall and pulled the shades down in his office to avoid distractions.
“It’s interesting — and sometimes discouraging — for me to note, in introspective moments, how close my strengths and weaknesses in making a chest of drawers are to the strengths and weaknesses in my writing,” Rooney wrote in his final book, 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit, published in 2009. “I feel the same helplessness with my shortcomings on paper and in my shop as I do when it occurs to me that I’m overweight.”
He made it look so easy, as if the aphorisms and homespun humor just rolled off his tongue. “If I have a deadline for a column or a television script, I sit down at the typewriter and damn well decide to have an idea. There’s nothing magical about the process, no flashing lights,” he wrote in a preface to Pieces of My Mind, a 1984 collection of columns. He crafted each line, revising as he went along and polishing it through multiple drafts to deliver gems such as this: “I’m always on the lookout for something good about people. Often months go by.”
Or this: “My mother always called me ‘sturdy’ and said I have big bones. A little fat is what I am.”
And this: “The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.”
Also, this: “No one ever said married life was easy and if anyone ever did say it and I missed it, they were wrong.”
The quality and durability of his writing on television were widely recognized. He was awarded the Writers Guild Award for Best Script of the Year six times, more than any other writer in television history. He received his first of four Emmy Awards for his television writing in 1968 for a CBS News series, Of Black America.
“He was a pioneer in the history of television and one of the most perceptive American social critics to have ever graced the airwaves,” said Don Carleton, executive director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, where Rooney’s papers are archived alongside those of several CBS colleagues. Carleton also conducted hours of oral history interviews with Rooney about his long career in television and the two men developed a friendship.
“Losing Andy Rooney left a void, a chasm,” said Scott Pelley, former CBS Evening News anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent. “Andy understood that popularity has nothing whatever to do with journalism. He always had the courage of his convictions and he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought about what he wrote.
“One of the most difficult things in television is to sit at a desk in a room and look into a camera and talk for two and half minutes and keep it interesting,” said Steve Kroft, longtime correspondent for 60 Minutes. “Very few people can do that. But Andy knew how to make that connection with the audience better than anybody who’s ever worked in television.”