Dan Gutman

Gutman's 1996 novel The Kid Who Ran for President was compared to the Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign by comedian John Oliver during an August 2016 segment of the show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. As a result, the book jumped in sales.

Gutman met his future wife, Nina Wallace, an illustrator, when she did freelance work for Computer Games. They married in 1983. They have lived in Haddonfield, New Jersey, and New York City, and have two children, Sam and Emma.

Gutman was a magazine editor and columnist. While editor-in-chief of pornographic magazine Stag, he became a fan of video games and launched a video-game magazine. Gutman became the first employee of Video Game Player (later Computer Games) in 1982. He said, "I started a magazine about video games and suddenly I was an expert in video games. I started writing about them and computers. All for grownups. It took me a long time to realize that writing for grownups was not my thing. It took me a long time to realize that what I was good at was writing for kids." His column appeared regularly in various computer-related magazines, such as Genie Livewire.

Gutman was born in New York City, moving with his family a year later to Newark, New Jersey, where on June 1, 1968, his father abandoned the family. His homemaker mother Adeline became a secretary and cared for Dan and his older sister, Lucy. After Vailsburg High School in Newark, Gutman graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in psychology in 1977 and started graduate school in that field until moving to New York City in 1980 to attempt a writing career.

Dan Gutman (born October 19, 1955) is an American writer, primarily of children's fiction.