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Michael Gilmore, who had previously written for Willamette Week. He liked her work and asked her
to contribute to Rolling Stone, where she profiled musicians and actors.
In 1982, Orlean moved to Boston and became staff writer at the alternative newsweekly The
Boston Phoenix, moving later to The Boston Globe, which made her a columnist. Her first book, Red
Sox and Bluefish: And Other Things that Make New England New England (1987), collects her
pieces from the Globe.
While still in Boston, she also started writing Saturday Night (1990), a book that chronicles how
people across the United States spend their Saturday evenings: dancing, bowling, dating, drinking,
and even murdering. Beyond its ostensible subject, it was an opportunity for Orlean to report on
ordinary people. “Observing different kinds of people in different parts of America who live in
different sorts of circumstances at leisure on Saturday night seemed like a perfect opportunity to
observe them in their most natural and self-selected setting—like studying an elephant romping
around in the Ngorongoro Crater as opposed to studying an elephant carrying an advertising
sandwich-board in front of a used-car lot in Miami,” she writes in the book’s introduction. Saturday
Night was well received, Publishers Weekly writing that “tight, clean prose and thoughtful
observations make this series of essays about the Saturday night experience hum with all the vitality
and activity of its subject.”
Orlean moved to New York in 1986, where she wrote for Rolling Stone and Vogue. Soon after she
arrived, she heard that The New Yorker’s new editor, Robert Gottlieb, was looking for writers for the
“Talk of the Town” section. Her first “Talk” piece was about how Benetton teaches its employees to
fold sweaters. “Some of my ideas were a little outside of The New Yorker mold, which Gottlieb
liked. He liked the populism of what I was interested in,” she says. Orlean became a staff writer in
1992.
In 1994, she read a newspaper article on the theft of two hundred rare orchids from the
Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park in Florida. The orchid thief was John Laroche, a horticultural
consultant who once ran an extensive nursery for the Seminole tribe, with dreams of making a fortune
by cloning the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii. Orlean interviewed Laroche after sitting through
his trial, and the result was “Orchid Fever,” which appeared in The New Yorker on January 23, 1995.
Orlean expanded her research and returned to the Florida swampland to pen The Orchid Thief: A
True Story of Beauty and Obsession (1998). The Wall Street Journal’s Frances Taliaferro called the
book “a swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great. Here
are visionary passions and fierce obsessions; heroic feats accomplished in exotic settings; outsize
characters, entrepreneurs at the edge of the frontier, adventurers.”
The Orchid Thief was the springboard for the movie Adaptation , directed by Spike Jonze (Being
John Malkovich) with a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman (who, in an odd twist, appears in the movie
as a character played by Nicolas Cage). Orlean is played by Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper portrays
Laroche (in a role that earned him an Oscar). Adaptation was the second movie developed from one
of Orlean’s pieces; the first was Blue Crush, which was developed from her article about teenage
surfer girls in Maui.