Adam Gopnik is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of three books. After moving to the city in 1980 to attend graduate school, he submitted story after story to the New Yorker, and was met with rejection after rejection until 1986, when the magazine published one of his pieces. Following the arrival of Tina Brown in 1992, Gopnik was hired as a New Yorker staff writer. From 1995 to 2000, he penned the much loved "Letter from Paris" column. More recently, he's chronicled the foibles of raising children in New York. Gopnik's bestselling book, 2001's Paris to the Moon, was a collection of essays he'd written for The New Yorker over the years. Recently, he published a quirky children's novel, The King in the Window, in 2005, another collection of essays, 2007's Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York, a 2009 book on Lincoln and Darwin, Angels and Ages, and The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food in 2011, among others. Though acclaimed by many, Gopnik's writing has been described as precious and pretentious by others. One especially vocal critic is Vanity Fair's James Wolcott: "I sometimes wonder if Adam Gopnik was put on this earth to annoy. If so, mission accomplished," Wolcott wrote in the New Republic.