D. J. Waldie

Named one of the city’s most influential interpreters by Los Angeles magazine in 2006 and called “a gorgeous distiller of architectural and social history” by the New York Times in 2007, D. J. Waldie is a contributing writer at Los Angeles magazine and a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of six books. Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir received the California Book Award for nonfiction in 1996. In 2004, Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles was named one of the best books of the year by the “Los Angeles Times Book Review. California Romantica became a Los Angeles Times best seller in 2007.

D. J. Waldie has lectured on the history of Los Angeles at the Internationalen Literaturfestivals Berlin, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, as well as at colleges and universities in Southern California.

D. J. Waldie has been a city official of Lakewood since 1977. He lives a not-quite-middle-class life in Lakewood, in the house his parents bought in 1946.