Barry, whose father was from
Brooklyn and whose mother was from
County Galway, Ireland, was born in
Queens, N.Y., and raised in Deer Park, N.Y. He graduated from St. Anthony's High School (now in Huntington, N.Y.) in 1976, when it was an all-boys high school in Smithtown, N.Y. His experiences at St. Anthony's figure in his memoir,
Pull Me Up. He graduated from
St. Bonaventure University in 1980 with a bachelor's degree in mass communications and received a master's degree in journalism from New York University. In 1983, after years working as a delicatessen clerk and ditch digger, Barry joined
The Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn., as a reporter, and moved to the
Providence Journal-Bulletin in 1987. In 1992, he won a shared
Polk Award for investigating the causes of a state banking crisis. In 1994, he was part of a Journal-Bulletin investigative team that won the
Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting after exposing corruption in the Rhode Island court system. Barry joined
The New York Times in 1995. He served as Long Island bureau chief, police bureau chief, City Hall bureau chief, and general assignment reporter for the Metropolitan desk before resurrecting the "About New York column" in 2003. Then, in 2007, he began the "This Land" column, which took him to all 50 states over the course of a decade. He now specializes in long-form narratives. His writing also appears in several non-fiction anthologies. == Personal life ==