A writer for The New Yorker since 1986, Adam Gopnik has come to be known as one of the preeminent, wittiest, and most charming interpreters of contemporary life writing today.

Born in Philadelphia and largely raised in Montreal, he received his BA. in Art History from McGill University, and then did his graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. While there he wrote the essay, "High and Low: On Picasso and Caricature" which David Cottington recently called "a seminal article" in Cubist studies. In 1990, he collaborated with Kirk Varnedoe on the exhibition "High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture," and co-wrote and the book of the same name, which Robert Hughes called "the indispensable text on its subject."

The New Yorker's art critic from 1987 to 1995, he left in that year to live and write in Paris. His expanded collection of his essays from Paris, Paris To The Moon appeared in 2000, was called by the New York Times "the finest book on France in recent years," and became a nationwide best-seller. He also wrote in Paris an adventure novel -- "not so much for children of all ages as for adults of any condition"-- entitled The King In The Window, which was published in 2005, and which the Journal of Fantasy & Science Fiction called "a spectacularly fine children's novel--children's literature of the highest order, which means literature of the highest order." He still often writes from Paris for The New Yorker, has edited the anthology Americans In Paris for the Library of America, and has written introductions to new editions of the works of Maupassant, Balzac and Proust.

His new book, Through The Children's Gate: A Home In New York collects and expands his essays from the past five years about life in New York and about raising two children in the shadow of various kinds of sadness. It includes the much-anthologized essays "Bumping Into Mr. Ravioli," about his daughter Olivia's imaginary friend, who is always too busy to play with her, and "Last of the Metrozoids," about the life and last year of Kirk Varnedoe.

In addition to his work as a writer, Mr. Gopnik has been an active lecturer. Out and about in America on what he calls "the Perpetual Tuition Tour," he has given lectures and readings in almost every major American city, and some smaller ones, too, from Jackson, Mississippi to Seattle, Washington. His more formal and extended lectures have included the New York Public Library/Oxford University Press lectures in New York; the Phillips Lecture in Washington and the Whitney Lecture in New York. He also this year hosted and presented an hour long film about New York, "Lighting Up New York," for the BBC in London.

Adam Gopnik has won the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism an unprecedented three times, as well as the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. He lives now in New York with his wife, Martha Parker, and their two children, Luke Auden and Olivia Esme Claire.