Paul Grondahl
Coming October 2026 from SUNY Press
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friends, and 60 Minutes colleagues, as well as archival research and abundant quotations of Rooney's own words through unpublished writings, personal letters, and pieces beloved by his legion of fans.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.
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
books
By H. Carl McCall with Paul Grondahl
SUNY Press, 2022
The story of the remarkable rise and illustrious career of H. Carl McCall, a revered figure in New York State politics and the first Black official elected to statewide office in New York.
Among the more than 30 photos in Carl McCall's Truly Blessed and Highly Favored memoir is one where he poses in front of a building in Albany named in his honor. Like the building, the prose soars epically, chronicling his magnificent odyssey as it recounts nearly a century of New York's political history." — New York Amsterdam News
"…a riveting story…" — Albany Times Union
Simon & Schuster / Free Press, 2004
University of Nebraska Press, (paperback edition) 2007
"Drawing on a wealth of material--the bibliography lists almost 100 books --Grondahl has written an imposing biography, detailing Roosevelt's life before becoming president while offering an absorbing look at his family and the politics (much of it corrupt) of that era." -- Booklist
"... Roosevelt grew as a politician in ways painted quite deftly by Grondahl."
-- Publishers Weekly
"A well-told new biography... Albany is Mr. Grondahl's turf, and here he gives free rein to his expertise." -- The New York Sun
"What Mr. Grondahl makes clearer is how Roosevelt's principled stands on civil service reform and social responsibility periodically sidetracked his phenomenal career." -- Washington Times
Washington Park Press. Albany, N.Y., 1997.
With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author William Kennedy.
A rich and compelling political biography of Mayor Erastus Corning 2nd, the nation's longest-tenured mayor of an American city and head of Albany's vaunted Democratic machine. First elected in 1941, Corning served until he died in office in 1983 after winning 11 consecutive elections.
"A minor classic -- a highly readable, meticulously researched and illuminating history of some fascinating and shadowy byways in the politics of the Empire State." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Detailed, accurate and eminently readable." -- Mario M. Cuomo, former Governor of New York
"Mayor Corning is a biographical feast. Here journalism at its finest merges with the art of the novelist. The book indeed resembles a series of fascinating interlocking novellas." -- R.W.B. Lewis, Pultizer Prize-winning biographer (Edith Wharton: A Biography)
"…features more than enough compelling characters, fascinating anecdotes, and corrupt machine politics to keep the narrative humming." — Chronogram
"This is an important book for Albany, for anyone interested in political power." — from the Introduction by William Kennedy
"Grondahl evokes his subject with novelistic assurance." — The New Yorker
"New York named the tallest building in the state north of the Big Apple Corning Tower because it was an apt description of the stature of Mayor Corning. Paul Grondahl's book makes this clear: it is detailed, accurate and eminently readable." — Mario M. Cuomo
Servant Publications. Ann Arbor, Mich., 2000
With a foreword by Eunice Kennedy Shriver
This heartwarming story describes how Sr. Mary Ann LoGiudice, a Sister of Mercy in Albany, N.Y., gained approval from her religious order to adopt and raise a young girl named Barbara, both of whose parents died of AIDS.
The nun and the young, HIV-positive girl formed an unlikely family and enjoyed many delightful, challenging and inspiring years together as mother and daughter.
"Her story is immensely moving and life-affirming." -- Bob Keeler, Newsday religious writer
"One of the most moving testimonies to the power of love that I have ever read." -- Sister Mary Rose McGeady, D.C. President of Covenant House, New York City
Whitston Publishing Company Inc., 2005
Albany, NY
A narrative history of one of the oldest orphanages in the United States that draws on archival research and oral histories. Founded in 1829 and formerly known as the Albany Orphan Asylum and the Albany Home for Children, this is a powerful and emotionally charged chronicle of often forgotten children left in institutional care.
"Grondahl uses his storytelling skills to make readers curious about the institution, to draw them into the lives of children and staff -- and to inspire them to care about those lives."
-- The Sunday Gazette, Schenectady, NY