David Gates, a Newsweek senior writer since January 1993, covers books and music for the magazine. He has also written a number of major stories, including the March 29, 1993 cover, "White Male Paranoia: Are They the Newest Victims--or Just Bad Sports?," which examined the increasing anger and defensiveness of white males.

Gates joined Newsweek as a correspondent in the Letters department in October, 1979. He became a researcher in 1983, was promoted to associate editor in 1987, and named general editor in 1986.

Prior to joining the magazine, Gates was a lecturer in the English department at the University of Virginia from 1975-1977, and an instructor at Harvard University in 1977.

He is the author of the novels "Jernigan" (Knopf, 1991), shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and "Preston Falls" (Knopf, 1998), shortlisted for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, and the short-story collection "The Wonders of the Inivisible World" (Knopf, 1999), also shortlisted for the NBCC Award. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and taught in the MFA writing programs at The New School, Hunter College and Columbia University; in fall 2002, he was a visiting writer at Pratt Institute. He has published fiction in such magazines as GQ and Esquire, and nonfiction pieces in The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, The New Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, BookForum, Rolling Stone, Spin, Smithsonian, Salon.com and the Journal of Country Music. And he has written introductions for the Modern Library editions of Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" and Dickens's "David Copperfield" and "Little Dorrit."

A native of Clinton, Connecticut, he studied English at the University of Connecticut and currently splits his time between Brooklyn and Washington County in upstate New York.