John Dolan (writer)
American journalist

John Carroll Dolan (born July 1955) is an American poet, author and essayist. He has been identified as the once-secret identity behind the pseudonym Gary Brecher, fictional author of the War Nerd column for the newspaper the eXile which has ceased publication. John Dolan writes as the War Nerd, but no longer "in full character" as Brecher, the two identities having merged.
Dolan formerly also wrote for and co-edited the eXile under his own name. After the newspaper's demise, he was a regular contributor to NSFWCorp and then from 2013 to 2015 to PandoDaily, again both as Dolan and Brecher. He is now featured on the left-wing geopolitics podcast "Radio War Nerd", which he co-hosts with Mark Ames. He also writes the podcast's subscriber newsletter and contributes to the eXiled Online.
Biography
Dolan was born in Denver, Colorado in 1955. Dolan taught and studied at UC Berkeley, where he completed a PhD thesis on the literary works of the Marquis de Sade. He has published poems in many U.S. and New Zealand literary journals and his first collection won the Berkeley Poetry Prize in 1988.
The public source identifies “John Dolan (writer)” as american journalist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around John, Dolan and writer.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Dolan (writer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.