Alex Palmer

Alex Palmer is the author of the New York Times Bestseller The Santa Claus Man: The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York, called “Engaging… intriguing… highly recommended for history fans” by Library Journal and “highly readable” by Publishers Weekly. It tells the history of Christmas in America through the true-crime tale of a Jazz Age hustler who founded an organization to answer children’s Santa letters — and fuel his own dark dreams.

Palmer is also the author of Weird-o-pedia: The Ultimate Collection of Surprising, Strange, and Incredibly Bizarre Facts About (Supposedly) Ordinary Things, published in 2012, offering up a wealth of unexpected facts of familiar things. His first book, Literary Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Literature, takes a look at some of the more colorful aspects of great writers and their works, and was published in 2010.

He is a full-time freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Esquire, Slate, Smithsonian, Mental Floss, Vulture, the New York Daily News, Publishers Weekly, and The Rumpus, among others.