Schlosser started his career as a journalist with
The Atlantic Monthly in
Boston. He quickly gained recognition with
investigative pieces, earning two awards within two years of joining the staff: he won the
National Magazine Award for reporting in his two-part series "Reefer Madness" and "Marijuana and the Law" (
The Atlantic Monthly, August and September 1994). He won the
Sidney Hillman Foundation award for his article "In the Strawberry Fields" (
The Atlantic Monthly, November 19, 1995). Schlosser wrote
Fast Food Nation (2001), an exposé on the unsanitary and discriminatory practices of the
fast food industry.
Fast Food Nation evolved from a two-part article in
Rolling Stone. The book won the 2002
Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Nonfiction. Schlosser helped adapt his book into
a 2006 film directed by
Richard Linklater. The film opened November 19, 2006.
Chew On This (2006), co-written with Charles Wilson, is an adaptation of the book for younger readers.
Fortune called
Fast Food Nation the "Best Business Book of the Year" in 2001. His 2003 book
Reefer Madness discusses the history and trade of
marijuana, the use of
migrant workers in
California strawberry fields, the
American pornography industry and the history of said industry.
William F. Buckley, Jr. gave
Reefer Madness a favorable review as did
BusinessWeek. Schlosser's book
Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety was published in September 2013. It focuses on the 1980
Damascus Titan missile explosion, a non-nuclear explosion of a
Titan II missile near
Damascus, Arkansas.
The New Yorker's
Louis Menand called it "excellent" and "hair-raising". He said that "
Command and Control is how nonfiction should be written." It was a finalist for the 2014
Pulitzer Prize for History. Schlosser has been working on a book on the
American prison system, which has been over 10 years in the making. ==Bibliography==