D. J. Waldie is a historian of Los Angeles, a memoirist, and a translator.
He has published six non-fiction books. Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (Norton, 1996 and 2005) explored the intersection of personality and place in Lakewood, California. Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out (Angel City Press, 2001), a collaboration with photographer Marissa Roth, observed downtown as it transitioned to its newest incarnation. Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles (Angel City Press, 2004) collected a decade of observations about the city’s rapid evolution. Close to Home: An American Album (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004) is a meditation on the American snapshot. No Circus (Damiani, 2016), a collaboration wit. hotographer Randi Malkin Steinberger, considers the phenomenology of houses tented for fumigation. In 2020, he published a second collection of essays called Becoming Los Angeles: My, Memory, and a Sense of Place (Angel City Press). In collaboration with Diane Keaton, Waldie provided the text for two photographic explorations of home: California Romantica (Rizzoli, 2007), dealing with homes in the Spanish Colonial Revival Style, and House (Rizzoli, 2012), examining post-modern interpretations of domesticity.
In 2006, Waldie was named by Los Angeles magazine as one of the “100 influentials” of Los Angeles. In 2007, the New York Times described his writing as “a gorgeous distillation of architectural and social history.” In 1998, Waldie received a Whiting Writers Award from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation of New York. In 2017, he was awarded the William R. and June Dale Prize for Urban and Regional Planning. In presenting the award, the Dale Prize committee noted that, “in books, essays, presentations, and commentary on urban issues, Waldie has sought to frame the suburban experience as a search for a sense of place for millions of ordinary Californians.” D. J. Waldie’s narratives about Los Angeles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He lives in Lakewood, California. He was born in 1948. Waldie began his career in public administration in Lakewood in 1977. He retired as Deputy City Manager of Lakewood in 2010.
