Guide Note

Dinesh D'Souza is a conservative author and pundit who gained prominence in the early 1980s through the Dartmouth Review, a bi-weekly college newspaper with a national conservative readership, and who reached something of a Waterloo in 2007 with the near-universally criticized book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11, which sought to blame the 9/11 attacks on such factors as sexual immodesty in America.

Fast Facts

1. Born: April 25, 1961
2. Birthplace: Bombay, India
3. Religion: Roman Catholic
4. Arrived in U.S. in 1978 through a Rotary International program
5. Graduated Dartmouth College in 1983
6. Dated Ann Coulter
7. Became a U.S. citizen in 1990
8. Books include The Enemy at Home (2007)
9. Former fellow of the American Enterprise Institute
10. Former fellow of the Hoover Institution

D'Souza has often sought and found controversy throughout his career. While he headed the Dartmouth Review, the paper obtained and published correspondence from a campus homosexual group, 'outing' several students. A subsequent article, the anti-affirmative action Dis Sho Ain't No Jive, Bro, was written in minstrel dialect, and caused New York Congressman Jack Kemp to resign from the paper's Advisory Board. D'Souza wrote a series of generally well-received books from a 1984 biography of Jerry Falwell to 1991's polarizing Illiberal Education before 1995's The End of Racism drew fire from both the left and right for allegedly justifying slavery and denying the existence of racism in America.

Like many conservative authors and pundits, D'Souza has drawn an income from foundation grants and fellowships, allowing for a certain independence from the exigencies of book sales. However, it was allegedly a desire to produce a bestselling title -- like those of Ann Coulter -- that led D'Souza to attempt The Enemy at Home, a book whose arguments against freedom in America were so beyond the comfort level of mainstream conservatism that National Review Online, normally the most casual of conservative venues, published a multi-author symposium attacking it. D'Souza's subsequent book, the pious What's So Great About Christianity, is considered by many as a work of atonement.