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Joe Klein (born September 7, 1946) is a longtime Washington, D.C. and New York journalist and columnist, perhaps best known for his novel Primary Colors, an anonymously-written roman à clef portraying Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign.

In his review of the Clinton Presidency The Natural he presents both a critical view and a favourable view on Clinton's Presidency. However he does state in The Natural that "the conventions of Journalism prevent me from fitting too neatly into one political niche (although as a columnist for the New Yorker and Newsweek) my predilections are obvious". Recently in several of his articles, such as The Absurdity of it All in Time, he has criticised George W Bush and the Republican White House over some foreign policy mishaps.

Contents 1 Early Life 2 First Books and New York 3 Primary Colors and the New Yorker 4 Time Magazine and Politics Lost 5 Personal Life 6 External link

He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in American civilization. In 1969, Klein began reporting for the Essex County Newspapers in Massachusetts. In 1972, he reported for Boston's WGBH and until 1974 he was also the news editor for Boston's The Real Paper. He was a contributing editor for Rolling Stone from 1975 to 1980 and Washington bureau chief from 1975 to 1977.

He published Woodie Guthrie: A Life in 1980 and the popular Payback: Five Marines After Vietnam in 1984. He was a political columnist for New York from 1987 to 1992 where he won the Peter Kihss Award for reporting on the 1989 race for Mayor of New York. Klein wrote a column called "Public Lives" for Newsweek in the early 1990s; served as a consultant for CBS News providing commentary (1992-1996); was political columnist for New York magazine (1987-1992); was a reporter for WGBH-TV Boston (1972) and news editor at The Real Paper (1972-1974). He was a contributing editor for Rolling Stone (1975-1980), and served as its Washington bureau chief (1975-1977).

In May 1992 he joined Newsweek and wrote the column "Public Lives", which won a National Headliner Award in 1994. Newsweek also won a National Magazine Award for their coverage of Bill Clinton's 1992 victory. From 1992 to 1996 he was also a consultant for CBS.

In January 1996, he anonymously published the novel Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics, based on the 1992 Democratic presidential primary. It spent 9 weeks as number one on the New York Times bestseller list. When Donald Foster correctly identified Klein as the novel's author, Klein denied it and publicly attacked Foster for publishing untrue and irresponsible speculation -- even going so far as to mislead readers of Newsweek with speculation that another writer wrote it -- before finally admitting that the "speculation" was correct. (The novel's first paragraph contains a sentence spoken by the not-yet-named narrator, "I am small and not so dark", speculated to be a reference to klein (the German word for "small")

In December 1996, he joined The New Yorker to write the "Letter from Washington" column. In 2000 he published The Running Mate, a sequel of sorts to Primary Colors and he published The Natural: Bill Clinton's Misunderstood Presidency in March 2002. The book is a balanced account of Clinton's two terms in office and an attempt to define his Presidency against its achievements and failures.

In January 2003, he joined Time to write a column called "In the Arena" on national and international affairs. It appears in TIME's upfront "Notebook" section. In April 2006, he published Politics Lost, a book on what he calls the "pollster-consultant industrial complex". He has also written articles and book reviews for The New Republic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, LIFE, Rolling Stone and other publications.

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives with his wife and two children in Westchester County, New York, and is also the father of two adult sons.

• Time: About Joe Klein