Terry Teachout grew up in Sikeston, Missouri....

Teachout grew up in Sikeston, Missouri. He attended St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland; William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri; and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He lived in Kansas City from 1975 to 1983, working as a jazz bassist and writing about classical music and jazz for the Kansas City Star. He moved to New York City in 1985, working as an editor at Harper's Magazine (1985-87) and an editorial writer for the New York Daily News (1987-93) and as the News' classical music and dance critic (1993-2000).

In 2004 he was appointed by President Bush to the National Council on the Arts, the advisory and review panel of the National Endowment for the Arts. In late 2005 he was hospitalized with congestive heart failure, but has since recovered. Teachout married Hilary Dyson on October 7, 2007. A political conservative with wide-ranging cultural interests and sympathies, he maintains cordial relationships with artists, critics, and bloggers from all parts of the political spectrum.

Teachout is the author of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, a biography of Louis Armstrong (2009, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; JR Books Ltd in the UK). "With Pops, his eloquent and important new biography of Armstrong, the critic and cultural historian Terry Teachout restores this jazzman to his deserved place in the pantheon of American artists," Michiko Kakutani wrote in her New York Times review of Pops. The Washington Post chose Pops as one of the ten best books of 2009 and Amazon.com chose it as one of the five best biographies of the year.

Teachout also wrote the libretto for The Letter, an opera by Paul Moravec based on the 1927 play by W. Somerset Maugham that was premiered on July 25, 2009, by the Santa Fe Opera.

Teachout's other books include All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine (2004, Harcourt), A Terry Teachout Reader (2004, Yale University Press), The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (2002, HarperCollins), and City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy (1991, Poseidon Press). He is the editor of Beyond the Boom: New Voices on American Life, Culture, and Politics (1990, Poseidon Press, introduction by Tom Wolfe) and Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-1959 (1989, Regnery Gateway). In 1992 he rediscovered the manuscript of A Second Mencken Chrestomathy among H.L. Mencken's private papers and edited it for publication by Alfred A. Knopf (1995).

Teachout wrote the forewords to Paul Taylor's Private Domain: An Autobiography (1999, University of Pittsburgh Press), Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado (2007, New York Review Books Classics), and William Bailey's William Bailey on Canvas (2007, Betty Cuningham Gallery) and contributed to The Oxford Companion to Jazz (2000, Oxford University Press), Field-Tested Books (2008, Coudal Partners), and Robert Gottlieb's Reading Dance (2008, Pantheon). He has written liner notes for CDs by jazz musicians Karrin Allyson, Gene Bertoncini, Ruby Braff and Ellis Larkins, Julia Dollison, Jim Ferguson, Roger Kellaway, Diana Krall, Joe Mooney, Marian McPartland, Mike Metheny, Maria Schneider, Kendra Shank and Luciana Souza, the pop-jazz Lascivious Biddies, the bluegrass band Nickel Creek, and the classical ensembles Chanticleer and the Trio Solisti.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Teachout

Q&A: Author Terry Teachout

Our guest on Q&A is Terry Teachout, author of "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong." Program from Sunday, January 31, 2010