Jeannette Walls Books in Order

If you want her most famous story first: The Glass Castle → Half Broke Horses
If you love historical fiction and tough heroines: Half Broke Horses → Hang the Moon
If you prefer coming of age novels: The Silver Star → Hang the Moon
If you are curious about celebrity and media culture: Dish → The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls writes about hard childhoods, complicated families, and the stubborn hope that keeps people moving forward. She is an American journalist and author best known for the memoir The Glass Castle and the related books Half Broke Horses, The Silver Star, and Hang the Moon.

Walls was born in 1960 in Phoenix, Arizona, to Rex and Rose Mary Walls and spent her early years on the move. Her parents piled the four children into old cars and crisscrossed the Southwest, stopping in dusty desert towns, the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, and mining communities in Nevada. Eventually the family landed in her father's hometown of Welch, West Virginia, in a three room house that had no plumbing, unreliable heat, and more than its share of vermin.

The chaotic years in Welch, with constant money trouble and her father's deepening alcoholism, convinced Walls that she would have to build a different life. At seventeen she left for New York City to live with her older sister Lori. She finished high school, answered phones at a Wall Street law firm, and pieced together grants, loans, scholarships, and work to attend Barnard College, graduating in 1984 with a degree in liberal arts.

Reporting became her way to make sense of the world. Walls started as an intern at a small Brooklyn paper, then became a full time reporter there. In the late nineteen eighties she joined New York magazine, where she wrote a widely read column that mixed politics, media, and high society and sharpened her eye for telling detail.

From there, celebrity gossip became her daily beat.

Through the nineteen nineties she covered famous people for national magazines and as a columnist for an online news outlet, developing a voice that could be sharp, funny, and skeptical at once. She also contributed to national newspapers and appeared on television programs, talking about the way rumor and image shape public life. All the while she kept mostly quiet about her own past, even as she dissected the public lives of others.

Her first book, Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip, grew out of that work. Published in 2000, it traces the history of American gossip, from old Hollywood columnists and scandal magazines to modern talk shows, and asks what our appetite for private stories reveals about power, celebrity, and the press.

In 2005 Walls turned inward with The Glass Castle, recounting her childhood in the desert, in Welch, and eventually in New York City. The memoir does not hide the neglect, hunger, and chaos, but it also gives space to her parents' charm, creativity, and unorthodox lessons. The book struck a chord with millions of readers, stayed on bestseller lists for years, earned several awards, and was later adapted into a feature film.

Half Broke Horses, published in 2009, steps back a generation to tell the story of her grandmother Lily Casey Smith, a horse breaker, teacher, and rancher who crossed the Southwest on horseback and ran a ranch in Arizona. In 2013 Walls released The Silver Star, a novel about two sisters growing up in a small Virginia mill town during the Vietnam era, and in 2023 she followed it with Hang the Moon, a historical novel about Sallie Kincaid, a bootlegger's daughter coming of age in Prohibition era Virginia.

Today Walls lives with her husband, writer John Taylor, on a farm in rural Virginia, where they keep animals and built a small home for her mother. She speaks often about resilience, shame, and education, urging readers who see themselves in her story to treat their past as a source of strength rather than a source of secrecy. Her work continues to draw in people who recognize in her pages a version of their own complicated families.