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About John Hoerr
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Hoerr was born and raised in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a steelmaking town in the heavily-industrialized
Monongahela Valley south of Pittsburgh. Growing up in the 1940s, he absorbed the culture
of a one-industry town as it moved from depression to postwar prosperity and, like many
young men of his generation, worked brief periods in the local mill while attending college.
Forty years later, in And the Wolf Finally Came, Hoerr drew on this background to
describe the devastation and misery left behind when more than a dozen major mills closed
in the steel heartland of western Pennsylvania. Historian Donald L. Miller of Lafayette
College, reviewing the book in the Philadelphia Inquirer, said: “Hoerr has the
eye and ear of a field anthropologist, and this is a deeply moving account of the human
consequences of the most spectacular industrial collapse of modern times. But it also is
a closely detailed, cooly perceptive analysis—the most complete and convincing so far—of
the reasons for that collapse” (“Death Knell for Steel,” August 21, 1988).
A 1953 graduate of Penn State, Hoerr served two years in the U.S. Army and began a journalistic
career in 1956 with United Press International in Newark and Trenton, NJ. Later he worked
at The Daily Tribune in Royal Oak, MI, rejoined UPI for two years in Chicago, and
served separate stints with Business Week, in Detroit and Pittsburgh, specializing
as a labor reporter on the automobile, steel and coal-mining industries. After five years
as an on-air reporter and documentary producer at WQED, the PBS station in Pittsburgh, he
returned to Business Week in 1975 as labor editor and later senior writer on the
New York staff. Since 1991, Hoerr has been a free-lance writer of nonfiction and fiction.
He lives with his wife Joanne in Teaneck, NJ and has two sons and five grandchildren.
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