Christopher Taylor Buckley is an American political satirist known for writing God Is My Broker, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, The White House Mess, No Way to Treat a First Lady, Wet Work, Florence of Arabia, Boomsday, Supreme Courtship, Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir and, most recently, The Relic Master: A Novel. He is the son of writer William F. Buckley Jr. and socialite Patricia Buckley.
After a classical education at the Portsmouth Abbey School, Buckley graduated from Yale University in 1975. He was a member of Skull and Bones like his father, living at Jonathan Edwards College. He became managing editor of Esquire.
In 1981, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work as chief speechwriter for Vice President George H. W. Bush. This experience led to his novel The White House Mess, a satire on White House office politics and political memoirs.
Buckley's Thank You for Smoking is another satire, its protagonist a lobbyist for the tobacco industry, Nick Naylor. He followed that with more humor about Washington in the form of Little Green Men, about the government agency investigating UFO sightings. His No Way To Treat A First Lady has the president's wife on trial for assassinating her husband and Florence of Arabia is about a do-gooding State Department bureaucrat in the Middle East. His one non-satirical novel, Wet Work, is about a billionaire businessman avenging his granddaughter's death from drugs.
Thank You for Smoking was adapted into a movie written and directed by Jason Reitman, and starring Aaron Eckhart. It was released on 17 March 2006.
Buckley also wrote the non-fiction Steaming To Bamboola, about the merchant marine, as well as contributed to an oral history of Milford, Connecticut, and is an editor at Forbes magazine. Buckley has written for many national newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time, The Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, US News & World Report, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Conde Nast Traveler and numerous humorous essays in The New Yorker.
