While working odd jobs in
Raleigh, Chicago, and New York City, Sedaris was discovered in a Chicago club by radio host
Ira Glass. Sedaris was reading a diary he had kept since 1977. Impressed with his work, Glass asked him to appear on his weekly local program,
The Wild Room. Referring to the opportunity, Sedaris said, "I owe everything to Ira... My life just changed completely, like someone waved a magic wand." Sedaris's success on
The Wild Room led to his
National Public Radio debut on December 23, 1992, when he read a radio essay on
Morning Edition titled "
Santaland Diaries," which described his purported experiences as an elf at
Macy's department store during Christmas in New York. "Santaland Diaries" was a success with listeners and made Sedaris what
The New York Times called "a minor phenomenon." He began recording a monthly segment for NPR, which was based on his diary entries and was edited and produced by Glass, and he also signed a two-book deal with
Little, Brown and Company.
Naked and his subsequent four essay collections,
Holidays on Ice (1997),
Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000),
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004), and
When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008), became
New York Times Best Sellers.
Me Talk Pretty One Day was written mostly in France, over seven months, and it was published in 2000 to "practically unanimous rave reviews." For that book, Sedaris won the 2001
Thurber Prize for American Humor. In April 2001,
Variety reported Sedaris had sold the
Me Talk Pretty One Day film rights to director
Wayne Wang, who was adapting four stories from the book for
Columbia Pictures. Wang had completed the script and begun casting when Sedaris asked to "get out of it," after he and his sister worried how their family might be portrayed. He wrote about the conversation and its aftermath in the essay "Repeat After Me." Sedaris recounted that Wang was "a real prince... I didn't want him to be mad at me, but he was so grown up about it. I never saw how it could be turned into a movie anyway." In 2004, Sedaris published
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, which reached number 1 on
The New York Times Nonfiction Best Seller List in June of that year. The audiobook of
Dress Your Family, read by Sedaris, was nominated for a
Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. The same year, Sedaris was nominated for a
Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for his recording
Live at Carnegie Hall. In March 2006, Ira Glass said that Sedaris's next book would be a collection of animal
fables; during that year, Sedaris included several animal fables in his US book tour, and three of his fables were broadcast on
This American Life. In September 2007, a new Sedaris collection was announced for publication the following year. The collection's working title was
All the Beauty You Will Ever Need, but Sedaris retitled it
Indefinite Leave to Remain and finally settled on the title
When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Although at least one news source assumed the book would be fables, Sedaris said in October 2007 that the collection might include a "surprisingly brief story about [his] decision to quit smoking," along with other stories about various topics, including chimpanzees at a typing school, and people visiting [him] in France. The book was described as his darkest, as it dealt with themes of death and dying. In December 2008, Sedaris received an honorary doctorate from
Binghamton University. In April 2010,
BBC Radio 4 aired
Meet David Sedaris, a four-part series of essays, which Sedaris read before a live audience. A second series of six programs began airing on
BBC Radio 4 Extra in June 2011, with a third series beginning in September 2012. In July 2017, the sixth series was aired and by 2025 the series had reached its 10th season on Radio 4. In 2010, he released a collection of stories,
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary. Sedaris released a collection of essays, ''
Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, in 2013 and, in 2017, published a collection of his 1977–2002 diaries, Theft By Finding
. Also in 2013, the film adaptation of an essay from Naked
was released as a feature-length movie, C.O.G.'' In July 2011, Sedaris's essay "Chicken Toenails, Anyone", published in
The Guardian, garnered some criticism over concerns that it was insensitive towards China and Chinese culture. A frequent guest of
late-night US talk show host
Craig Ferguson, in April 2012, Sedaris joined Ferguson and the cast of CBS's
The Late, Late Show in Scotland for a theme week filmed in and around
Cumbernauld and in
Edinburgh. The five weeknight episodes aired in May 2012. Sedaris's ninth book, ''
Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls'', was released in April 2013. In 2014, he participated in
Do I Sound Gay?, a documentary film by David Thorpe about
stereotypes of gay men's speech patterns. He appeared along with his sister Amy as special guest judges on season 8, episode 8, of ''
RuPaul's Drag Race. He also appeared as a guest in the Adult Swim television series FishCenter Live''. Sedaris guest starred on the
Netflix animated comedy-drama series
BoJack Horseman as the mother of Princess Carolyn, voiced by Amy Sedaris. In 2019, Sedaris was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. A greatest-hits compilation of his essays and short fiction entitled
The Best of Me was released in November 2020. In 2022, he published
Happy Go Lucky, in which he reflected on his relationship with his recently deceased father. In 2025, Sedaris was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Literature by the
University of Chichester.
Truth of nonfiction work In 2007, in an article in
The New Republic,
Alexander S. Heard stated that much of Sedaris's work is insufficiently factual to justify being marketed as nonfiction. Several published responses to Heard's article argued that Sedaris's readers are aware that his descriptions and stories are intentionally exaggerated and manipulated to maximize comic effect, while others used the controversy as a springboard for discussing the liberties publishers are willing to take when calling books "nonfiction". Subsequently, in the wake of a controversy involving
Mike Daisey's dramatizing and embellishing his personal experiences at Chinese factories, during an excerpt from his theatrical monologue for
This American Life, new attention has been paid to the veracity of Sedaris's nonfiction stories. NPR labels stories from Sedaris, such as "Santaland Diaries", as fiction, while
This American Life fact checks stories, to the extent that memories and long-ago conversations can be checked.
The New Yorker already subjects nonfiction stories written for that magazine to its comprehensive
fact-checking policy.
The Talent Family Sedaris has written several plays with his sister, actress
Amy Sedaris, under the name "The Talent Family". These include
Stump the Host (1993),
Stitches (1994),
One Woman Shoe, which co-starred
David Rakoff (1995) and
The Little Frieda Mysteries (1997). All were produced and presented by
Meryl Vladimer while she was the artistic director of "the CLUB" at
La MaMa, E.T.C.
The Book of Liz (2001) was written by Sedaris and his sister Amy, and produced by Drama Dept. at The Greenwich Theater in New York.
The New Yorker Sedaris has contributed over 40 essays to
The New Yorker magazine and blog. == Personal life ==