John Brooks (writer)

John Brooks (December 5, 1920 – July 27, 1993) was a writer and longtime contributor to The New Yorker magazine, where he worked for many years as a staff writer, specializing in financial topics. Brooks was also the author of several books, both fiction and non-fiction, the best known of which was an examination of the financial shenanigans of the 1960s Wall Street bull market.

John Nixon Brooks was born on December 5, 1920, in New York City, but grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. He graduated from Kent School in Kent, Connecticut in 1938 and Princeton University in 1942. After graduation Brooks joined the United States Army Air Forces, in which he served as a communications and radar officer from 1942 until 1945. He was aboard the First United States Army headquarters ship on D-Day during the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944.

After leaving the military, Brooks went to work for Time magazine, where he became a contributing editor. He worked at Time for only two years, pining for a chance to write at more length and in a looser style than that dictated by the newsweekly format. In 1949, Brooks got his break. That year he joined The New Yorker as a staff writer – a development he later called the lucky break that made his career. While working at The New Yorker, Brooks also began contributing book reviews to Harper's Magazine and The New York Times Book Review.

Brooks was the author of three novels, one – The Big Wheel, published in 1949 – describing a newsmagazine much like Time. He also published ten non-fiction books on business and finance, the subject in which he specialized for The New Yorker. Brooks's best-known books were Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920–1938, about the scandal surrounding Wall Street banker Richard Whitney; The Go-Go Years, on the speculative bubble of Wall Street in the 1960s; The Takeover Game about the merger mania of the 1980s.; and of special note, Business Adventures, which has been cited as Bill Gates' favorite business book.

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