His career started as a sportswriter for the weekly
The Santa Fe Reporter in 1977 before moving on to become a staff writer for
Time magazine, focusing on environmental stories, in 1978. In 1980, Shnayerson became the editor-in-chief of
AVENUE magazine, a glossy monthly distributed to upper-income households in New York and Los Angeles. In 1986, he became a staff writer at
Vanity Fair and went on to publish more than 75 feature stories for the magazine over the next three decades, ranging from political pieces to art world intrigue and celebrity cover stories. Also in 1986, joined the launch staff for
Condé Nast Traveler, created by famed British editor
Harold Evans. His first book, in 1989, was a biography of
Irwin Shaw, prominent novelist and short story writer of the mid-20th century. In 1996, he wrote ''The Car That Could: The Inside Story of GM's Revolutionary Electric Vehicle
, which was named one of the best business books of that year by BusinessWeek
. In 2002, he authored The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise of Drug-Resistant Bacteria
before writing Coal River: How a Few Brave Americans Took On a Powerful Company - and the Federal Government - to Save the Land They Love'' in 2008. Shnayerson's fifth book was a collaborative biography of singer, actor and civil rights activist
Harry Belafonte, titled
My Song in 2011. In 2016, he wrote
The Contender, an unauthorized biography of New York Governor
Andrew Cuomo, while his seventh book,
BOOM: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art was released in 2019. For
BOOM, Shnayerson interviewed more than 200 art world figures to write a popular history of contemporary history and the dealers who helped make the market what it became. Among them were interviews with all four mega dealers, which included
David Zwirner,
Iwan Wirth of Hauser & Wirth,
Arne Glimcher of
Pace Gallery, and
Larry Gagosian.
BOOM begins in the post-
World War II period with the rise of abstract expressionism and its nurturing by dealers
Peggy Guggenheim,
Betty Parsons and
Sidney Janis. It continues through Leo Castelli and the Pop Period, on through the 1980s most prominent dealers (Mary Boone, Larry Gagosian, Arne Glimcher) and the neo-expressionists they promoted (Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Salle, Eric Fischl) through the fracturing of styles over the last three decades, and the explosive growth of the global contemporary art market. BOOM is in its fourth printing. Television rights have been sold to producer and talent manager Guymon Casady. ==Background==