Literature / Press & broadcasting
John Grogan
born 1957 · journalist, memoirist
Newspaper columnist and author of Marley & Me, born in Detroit and raised in the Oakland County lake suburb of Orchard Lake Village.
- Born
Detroit, Michigan
age 69- Birth name
- John Joseph Grogan
- Detroit years
- 1957–1975
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Grogan was born in Detroit in 1957, the youngest of four children in an Irish Catholic family that soon moved to the Harbor Hills neighborhood of Orchard Lake Village in Oakland County. He attended Brother Rice, the Catholic boys' school in Bloomfield Hills, before switching to West Bloomfield High School, where he graduated in 1975, and then studied journalism at Central Michigan University. After years as a reporter and columnist in Michigan, Florida and Philadelphia, he wrote Marley & Me (2005), a memoir about his family's unruly Labrador, which became a runaway bestseller and a 2008 film. His follow-up memoir The Longest Trip Home revisits his Catholic childhood in suburban Detroit.
Highlights
- Marley & Me (2005), a No. 1 bestseller filmed in 2008
- The Longest Trip Home (2008), a memoir of growing up in suburban Detroit
- Columnist for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and The Philadelphia Inquirer
- West Bloomfield High School graduate (1975)