Best-selling American satirist dies aged 74

American satirist and political commentator, P.J. O’Rourke, has died of lung cancer at his home in Sharon, New Hampshire aged 74. He wrote more than 20 books and was best known for his two best-sellers: ‘A Parliament of Whores’ and ‘Give War a Chance’, which reached the top of the New York Times Best Seller list.

His last book ‘A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land’ was published in September 2020 and contained a number of essays on topics ranging from history to the political effects of social media and the ‘internet of things’.

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He started his career as an editor of the US humor magazine, National Lampoon, and later worked as a freelance author for Atlantic Monthly, Esquire and Vanity Fair. He also served as a head of the foreign affairs desk at Rolling Stone magazine.

He also wrote a column for the Daily Beast for a time and made a number of appearances on TV and radio shows, including ‘60 Minutes’ in the 1990s and then the ‘Real Time With Bill Maher’, ‘The Daily Show’, and ‘Charlie Rose’.

Deemed to be a conservative and libertarian commentator, O’Rourke targeted both Democrats and Republicans in his works. He was particularly critical of the state of US politics around 2016 when Donald Trump was elected US president.

“The American public wasn’t holding either political party in much esteem,” O’Rourke wrote in his book ‘How the Hell Did This Happen? The Election of 2016’, which was published two years after the vote. “What the American public was holding was its nose,” he added.

O’Rourke died of complications related to lung cancer, Deb Seager, the director of the author’s publisher Gove Atlantic, confirmed. The publisher also called him “one of the major voices of his generation.”