Roger L. Simon

Born to a Jewish family in New York City on November 22, 1943, Simon is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Yale School of Drama. He has been married three times. He is married to Sheryl Longin, who wrote the screenplay for Dick, a film spoof of events in the Watergate political scandal. In 1997 Simon directed the feature film Prague Duet based on a script he wrote with Longin. They have lived in Nashville, Tennessee with their daughter.

Simon remained conventionally liberal until the 1990s when he began asking questions in response to events such as the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Simon, a former civil rights activist in the 1960s, said he was shocked by "the kind of essential dishonesty to justice" of Simpson's acquittal. Simon said, "I found the use of racial politics in the O.J. trial so repellent to me, morally, but also, I couldn't believe it was happening right there in front of my eyes. It started to shake up some things. And then came 9/11."

Simon experienced a political transformation in which he felt alienated from what he saw as the excesses of the Left after the realities of the September 11 attacks affected him. He jokes, "I may be the first American writer who was profiled both by Mother Jones and National Review." He supports same-sex marriage and the war on terror, and contends that those issues are linked. He also edits a weblog. In 2005 he founded, with jazz guitarist Charles Johnson, webmaster of the Little Green Footballs weblog, a startup company called Pajamas Media. Pajamas Media, now known as PJ Media, expanded in 2008 into Internet television with Pajamas TV, later known as PJTV. Simon, with screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd, hosts PJTV's "Poliwood" show, covering the intersection of politics and Hollywood.

Simon's first non-fiction book, Blacklisting Myself: Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in the Age of Terror, was published by Encounter Books in February 2009. It was republished in 2011 with additional material under the title Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine: The Perils of Coming Out Conservative in Tinseltown

In May 2015, Simon began writing the Diary of a Mad Voter blog for PJ Media to cover the presidential election of 2016, interviewing major candidates in print and video.

Simon's recent book -I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It hasn't Already – was published by Encounter Books in June 2016.