On an average day, one of John Grogan’s columns in the Philadelphia Inquirer might receive 30 to 50 responses. When he wrote about the passing of his 13-year-old Labrador retriever, Marley, nearly 800 messages flooded his email and voicemail. “That’s when I knew,” he says, “I had a bigger story to tell.”

That story became Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, a #1 New York Times bestseller and a touchstone for millions of people worldwide. His account of what a misbehaving dog meant to his family is part of Grogan’s irresistible, ongoing conversation with people about loyalty, optimism, and unconditional love.

Grogan didn't start out writing about dogs. He got his first newspaper job in 1979, covering the police beat. After winning a fellowship to the Kiplinger Mid-Career Program in Public Affairs Reporting at Ohio State University, he joined the South Florida Sun-Sentinel where he progressed to columnist — "a job I found suited me better than I ever imagined any job could."
 

John did a great job --- he engaged the audience and spoke to a theatre house of more that 1,000 people as if he were having a cup of coffee with them.”

Mesa County Libraries, Grand Junction, Colorado

An avid gardener, Grogan made a major career shift in 1999 when he became editor-in-chief of Rodale’s Organic Gardening magazine. But several years later, the award-winning journalist returned to his first love, joining the Philadelphia Inquirer as a three-day-a-week metro columnist.

In Marley & Me, Grogan recounts how he and his wife, Jenny, brought home a yellow furball they named after the Reggae star Bob Marley. But their adorable puppy soon grew into a 97-pound incorrigible, untrainable — yet deeply lovable—menace to the household. He swallowed expensive jewelry, was kicked out of obedience school, shut down an entire beach, and dug through drywall at the first sign of a thunderstorm.

Marley was the kind of dog that thousands give up on every year. But Grogan did not – and Marley returned the loyalty one hundred fold. Whether comforting the Grogans following a devastating miscarriage, allowing their three children to pull and tug at his fur without so much as a grumble, or guarding a 17-year-old neighbor after a brutal stabbing, Marley proved he was a dog like no other.
 
Translated into nearly three-dozen languages, Marley’s adventures have amused, moved, and inspired millions. “My book,” says Grogan, who is currently at work on a new memoir, “is not so much a ‘dog book’ as the story of a family in the making and a bigger-than-life animal that helped shape it.”

In his praised and popular public appearances, Grogan — who has been featured on Good Morning America, The Today Show, CBS' The Early Show, The Howard Stern Show, National Geographic Channel's The Dog Whisperer, and in The New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and People magazine — shares what his dog taught him about constancy and good-heartedness, “that commitment matters. That ‘in good times and bad, in sickness and health’ really means something.”

All who hear him will agree.