Eric Schlosser has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. After graduating from Princeton with a degree in American History, Schlosser tried his hand at several professions (playwright, novelist, script writer) before finally turning to non-fiction in his early thirties. Although his idea for an article on homosexuals in the military was turned down by the Atlantic Monthly, the magazine offered him another assignment: writing about the New York City bomb squad after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Other assignments followed, one of which was about America and its fast food industry. What began as a simple magazine article turned into an international bestseller. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All American Meal, was on the New York Times bestsellers list for nearly two years. It appeared on the bestseller lists of the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, USA Today, Business Week, and Publishers Weekly, as well as on bestseller lists in Canada, Great Britain and Japan.

His second New York Times bestseller, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (May 2003), was also inspired by his earlier articles on the enforcement of marijuana laws in America and illegal immigration in California. His two-part series, “Reefer Madness” and “Marijuana and the Law” (Altantic Montly, August and September, 1994), won a National Magazine Award for reporting, and his article, “In the Strawberry Fields” (Atlantic Monthly, November 1995), received a Sidney Hillman Foundation award.

Schlosser has appeared on 60 Minutes, CNN, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, FOX News, The O’Reilly Factor, and Extra!. He has been interviewed on NPR and covered in Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, and the New York Times. His work also has appeared in Rolling Stone and The New Yorker.

He is currently working on a book about the American prison system.