Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. His weekly 1,500-word essay helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the paper introduced in the Sunday Week in Review section in April 2005.

Mr. Rich started as a columnist on the Op-Ed Page in January 1994. He first began writing his longer-form essays for the Op-Ed page in 1999, and from 1999 to 2003 was also a senior writer for The New York Times Magazine, a dual title that was a first for The Times. Before writing his column, Mr. Rich served as The Times’s chief drama critic beginning in 1980, the year he joined The Times.

From 2003 to 2005, Mr. Rich was the front-page columnist for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section as part of that section’s redesign and expansion. He also served in an advisory role in the revamping of The Times’s daily and Sunday cultural report during that time.

Among other honors, Mr. Rich received the George Polk Award for commentary in 2005. In addition to his work at The Times, he has written about politics and culture for many other publications. His latest book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America, was published by Penguin Press in 2006 and as a Penguin paperback in 2007. His childhood memoir, Ghost Light, was published in 2000 by Random House and as a Random House Trade Paperback in 2001. The film rights to Ghost Light have been acquired by Storyline Entertainment. A collection of Mr. Rich’s drama reviews, Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993, was published by Random House in October 1998. His book The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson, co-authored with Lisa Aronson, was published by Knopf in 1987.

In May 2008, Mr. Rich signed on as a creative consultant to help initiate and develop new programming at the pay-TV network HBO.

Before joining The Times, Mr. Rich was a film and television critic at Time magazine. Earlier, he had been film critic for The New York Post and film critic and senior editor of New Times Magazine. He was a founding editor of The Richmond (Va.) Mercury, a weekly newspaper, in the early 1970s.

Mr. Rich earned a B.A. degree in American History and Literature, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1971 and serving as Editorial Chairman of The Harvard Crimson.

Mr. Rich has two sons. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the author and novelist Alex Witchel, who is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.

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