Max Brooks

Max Brooks is the son of filmmaker Mel Brooks and actress Anne Bancroft. As a child, he struggled with dyslexia, and Bancroft shelved her acting career in order to advocate for and support him. When he was 12, Brooks was so focused as he worked on a short story that his mother predicted that he would become a writer. After getting an undergraduate degree in history and then attending film school, Brooks worked as a writer for Saturday Night Live. He didn’t enjoy his job much because he found it hard to work in a collaborative environment, and in 2003, his contract wasn’t renewed. However, by then, he’d sold his first book, The Zombie Survival Guide. He went on to write World War Z, which was published in 2006. Paramount Pictures acquired the movie rights to the book and Brad Pitt starred in and produced the film, which was released in 2013. In 2019, the book was also made into a videogame. Brooks has said that he suffers from anxiety and his own meticulous research into disaster preparedness percolates into his fiction. His research is so thorough that he has been invited to prepare in an Army Weapons of Mass Destruction preparedness exercise, and has also served as a fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute. After World War Z, Brooks has written several other books, including Minecraft: The Island, a novel based on the popular videogame, and Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainer Sasquatch Massacre, which is about Bigfoot.