Daniel M. Lavery

Lavery has credited the work of Shirley Jackson and her novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in particular, and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress as influential.[13]

Lavery wrote for Gawker and The Hairpin.[14][15] Through this work he met Nicole Cliffe, with whom he operated The Toast, a feminist general interest web site,[16] from July 2013 to July 2016.[8]

He was included in the 2015 Forbes "30 under 30" list in the media category.[17] On November 9, 2015, Slate announced he would take over the magazine's "Dear Prudence" advice column from Emily Yoffe.[18] He stopped writing the column in May 2021.[19]

In 2017, he launched Shatner Chatner, a paid e-mail newsletter on Substack.[5][6] On May 19, 2021, Lavery accepted a Substack Pro deal and shortened the newsletter's name to The Chatner.[7]

Lavery's first book, Texts from Jane Eyre, was released in November 2014[20][21] and became a New York Times bestseller.[22] The book was based on a column he wrote first at The Hairpin, then continued at The Toast,[14] which imagines well-known literary characters exchanging text messages. The premise was inspired by a comments section thread on a piece Cliffe had written for The Awl; on Cliffe's review of Gone With the Wind, a commentator wrote that his or her experience in the South was nearly identical to the novel "except everybody has cell phones". This prompted him to imagine how Scarlett O'Hara might have used a cell phone.[23]

Lavery's first comic one-shot, entitled Rick and Morty Presents: Krombopulos Michael, was published by Oni Press on June 20, 2018, following the Rick and Morty character of the same name.[24]

A short story collection, The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror (Henry Holt, 2018), appeared in 2018.[25][26] The book, his second release, was highly anticipated, with Publishers Weekly, Bustle, The A.V. Club and InStyle Australia included in their lists of forthcoming titles in 2018.[27][28][29][30] The Merry Spinster reinvents fairy tales such as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast; in the Los Angeles Times, Agatha French described his renderings as making the "stories both weirder and yet somehow more familiar".[13]

Lavery's third book, a memoir entitled Something That May Shock and Discredit You, was published in February 2020 by Simon & Schuster.[31] It was originally published as individual essays.[32]