James Wolcott (born December 10, 1952) is an American journalist, known for his critique of contemporary media. Wolcott is the cultural critic forVanity Fair and contributes toThe New Yorker. He had his own blog onVanity Fair magazine's main site which was awarded aWebby Award in 2007.

Wolcott was born inBaltimore,Maryland, and raised in a suburban setting. He attended Maryland'sFrostburg State College for two years. From there, he moved to New York City, to work atThe Village Voice, first in the circulation department answering phone complaints, then as a receptionist.^[1] He is married toLaura Jacobs, a contributing editor atVanity Fair. He began practicing theTranscendental Meditation technique in 2007.^[2]

Since arriving in New York, Wolcott has been a columnist on media and pop culture for such publications asEsquire,Harper's Magazine,The New Yorker,The New York Review of Books andNew York. He was taken on atVanity Fair byLeo Lerman, then the magazine's editor.^[3]

Wolcott's novel,The Catsitters, was published in 2001. In 2004, he publishedAttack Poodles and Other Media Mutants, a critique of right-wing media in the United States.

His memoirLucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York was published on October 25, 2011.

• 2014PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay forCritical Mass^[4]

This list isincomplete; you can help byadding missing items.(October 2015)

• Wolcott, James (2001).The Catsitters: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins.

• Wolcott, James (2004).Attack Poodles, and Other Media Mutants: The Looting of the News in a Time of Terror. New York: Miramax Books.
• Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York
• Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs^[5]
• — (December 2012)."Dry, with a twist". Spotlight.Vanity Fair. Vol. 628. pp. 169–171.
• — (June 2013)."Andrew Breitbart's Circus Maximus".Vanity Fair. Vol. 634. pp. 52–53.
• "Sisyphus at the Selectric" (review ofBlake Bailey,Philip Roth: The Biography, Cape, April 2021, 898 pp.,ISBN 978 0 224 09817 5;Ira Nadel,Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Oxford, May 2021, 546 pp.,ISBN 978 0 19 984610 8; andBenjamin Taylor,Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth, Penguin, May 2020, 192 pp.,ISBN 978 0 525 50524 2),London Review of Books, vol. 43, no. 10 (20 May 2021), pp. 3, 5–10. Wolcott: "He's a great writer but is he agreat writer? And what does 'great writer' mean now anyhow?" (p. 10.)

• James Wolcott article archive atVanity Fair
• James Wolcott's blog, before 2006-10-18
• Maneker, Marion,"The King James Version: Critic James Wolcott, the reigning monarch of the literary put-down, is about to publish his first novel, and legions of his victims are already sharpening their knives",New York magazine, June 11, 2001
• Bernhard, Brendan,"Medium Cool: James Wolcott on lowbrow vs. highbrow, common sense and his first novel,The Catsitters",LA Weekly, June 27, 2001.

• 1952 births
• Living people
• 21st-century American novelists
• American bloggers
• American male journalists
• American male novelists
• Frostburg State University alumni
• PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award winners
• Vanity Fair (magazine) people
• Journalists from Baltimore
• Journalists from New York City
• The Village Voice people
• 21st-century American male writers
• Novelists from New York (state)
• Novelists from Maryland
• 21st-century American non-fiction writers
• American male bloggers

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Use mdy dates from April 2014
• Incomplete lists from October 2015