David Shields

David Shields is an American writer of nonfiction and hybrid literature. He is best known for Reality Hunger (2010) and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (2008). He has received a Guggenheim fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships.

David Shields was born in Los Angeles, California. He grew up in a lower-middle-class Jewish family. Both of his parents worked as journalists. He completed a BA at Brown University in 1978, graduating magna cum laude. He later earned an MFA with honours from the University of Iowa in 1980.

After completing his studies, Shields began an academic career. From 1985 to 1988, he taught as a visiting assistant professor at St. Lawrence University in New York. In 1996, he joined the MFA programme at Warren Wilson College. He later became a visiting professor at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Since 2010, he has served as the Milliman Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Washington.

Shields published his first novel, Heroes (1984), with Simon & Schuster. The book focuses on sport and obsession. His second novel, Dead Languages (1989), is semi-autobiographical and addresses speech impairment. During the 1990s, his work shifted toward nonfiction and collage forms. Remote (1996) examined life under celebrity culture.

In 1999, he published Black Planet (1999), which explores race during an NBA season. The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN USA Award.

The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (2008) became a New York Times bestseller. Reality Hunger (2010) argued for collage-based writing and challenged the norms of fiction. In 2020, Lit Hub named it one of the most important books of the decade.

Alongside books, Shields has worked in film. He co-wrote and starred in I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, released in 2017. In 2019, he wrote and directed Lynch: A History, a documentary about Marshawn Lynch. He later wrote and directed How We Got Here, released alongside a book of the same name in 2024.

His most recent book is Failure Is the Only Subject (2026). The book examines divorce, psychoanalysis, and emotional collapse. It follows David Shields as he studies documentary films about disappointment.

Photo credit: Tom Collicott