While working odd jobs in Raleigh, Chicago, and New York City, Sedaris was discovered in a Chicago club by radio host Ira Glass. (He did not attend Princeton University, although he spoke fondly of doing so in 'What I Learned', a comic baccalaureate address delivered at Princeton in June 2006). He moved to Chicago in 1983 and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987. He describes his lack of success in several of his essays. In his teens and twenties, David dabbled in visual and performance art. Sanderson High School in Raleigh, Sedaris briefly attended Western Carolina University before transferring to and dropping out of Kent State University in 1977. Tiffany died by suicide in 2013, a subject David deals with in the essay 'Now We Are Five', which was published in The New Yorker. His siblings, from oldest to youngest, are Lisa, Gretchen, Amy, Tiffany, and Paul ('the Rooster'). The Sedaris family moved when David was young, and he grew up in a suburban area of Raleigh, the second oldest child of six.

His mother was Protestant, and his father was Greek Orthodox, which was the faith in which David was raised. Sedaris was born in Johnson City, New York to Sharon Elizabeth (née Leonard) and Louis Harry 'Lou' Sedaris (1923–2021), an IBM engineer.

In 2019, Sedaris was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He is the brother and writing collaborator of actress Amy Sedaris. Much of Sedaris's humor is ostensibly autobiographical and self-deprecating and often concerns his family life, his middle-class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, his Greek heritage, homosexuality, jobs, education, drug use, and obsessive behaviors, as well as his life in France, London, New York, and the South Downs in England. His next book, Naked (1997), became his first of a series of New York Times Bestsellers, and his 2000 collection Me Talk Pretty One Day won the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay ' Santaland Diaries”. School of the Art Institute of Chicago ( BA)ĭavid Raymond Sedaris ( / s ɪ ˈ d ɛər ɪ s/ born December 26, 1956) is an American humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor.

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