What is Bill Bryson's Net Worth?
Bill Bryson is an American-British author and journalist who has a net worth of $10 million. Bill Bryson is known for writing such popular non-fiction books as "A Walk in the Woods," "Notes from a Small Island," and "A Short History of Nearly Everything." After announcing his retirement from writing books in 2020, he recorded an audiobook entitled "The Secret History of Christmas." Among his other activities, Bryson served as the chancellor of Durham University from 2005 to 2011.
Early Life and Education
William Bryson was born on December 8, 1951 in Des Moines, Iowa to Bill Sr. and Agnes, both of whom worked for the Des Moines Register newspaper. He had a brother named Michael and a sister named Mary. For his higher education, Bryson attended Drake University for two years before dropping out in 1972 to backpack across Europe. He eventually returned to Drake and completed his degree.
Career Beginnings
Bryson visited the United Kingdom for the first time in 1973, and decided to stay after he landed a job at a psychiatric hospital in Surrey, England. He later became a journalist, first for the Bournemouth Evening Echo and then for The Times and The Independent. While living in the United States in the 1990s, Bryson penned a column for a British newspaper detailing his repatriation.
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Books
In 1984, Bryson published his first book, "The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words." Emphasizing his preoccupation with language, the book catalogs some of the most misused words and phrases in the English language. Bryson went on to pen two travel books, including 1989's "The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America." Returning to the subject of language, he then wrote "The Mother Tongue: English & How it Got That Way," which was published in 1990. In early 1992, Bryson published the humorous travelog "Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe." He followed that with the language book "Made in America" in 1994. The year after that, Bryson published the humorous travel book "Notes from a Small Island," which explores all corners of Great Britain. His next book was the travel book "A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail," which was published in 1998. The book was later adapted into a feature film starring Nick Nolte and Robert Redford. Closing out the 1990s, Bryson published "Notes from a Big Country," or "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" as it was entitled in the United States. The book consists of articles he wrote for Britain's The Mail on Sunday newspaper about his relocation to the US.
Bryson's first book of the new millennium was the Australian travelog "Down Under," or "In a Sunburned Country" as it was called in the US and Canada. He subsequently wrote "Bill Bryson's African Diary," about his experiences traveling in Kenya in 2002. After that, Bryson published the popular science book "A Short History of Nearly Everything," which was a particularly big hit in the UK. He went on to write the memoir "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid," about his upbringing in Des Moines; it was published in 2006. Early the next year, Bryson published the biography "Shakespeare: The World as Stage." Turning to the history genre, he then wrote "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" (2010) and "One Summer: America, 1927" (2013). Bryson's next book, a travel book, was 2015's "The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island." He went on to write his second book of popular science, "The Body: A Guide for Occupants," which was published in 2019. Bryson announced his retirement from writing books the following year, although he would later record the 2022 audiobook "The Secret History of Christmas."
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Honors and Awards
Bryson has received numerous honors and awards for advancing knowledge of science and language through his writing. In 2004, he won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books for "A Short History of Nearly Everything." The next year, Bryson received the Royal Society of Chemistry's President's Award. In 2006, he was made an honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire, and in 2007 he won the Bradford Washburn Award from Boston's Museum of Science and the James Joyce Award from University College Dublin's Literary and Historical Society.
In 2012, Bryson earned the Kenneth B. Myer Award from the Florey Institute of Neuroscience in Melbourne, Australia. The year after that, he was named an honorary fellow of the Royal Society. Among his other honors, Bryson has earned several honorary doctorates, including from Durham University, Bournemouth University, the University of Leicester, King's College London, and the University of Iowa. As the chancellor of Durham University from 2005 to 2011, he saw one of the school's main libraries renamed in his honor.
Personal Life
While working at the Holloway Sanatorium in Surrey in the 1970s, Bryson met nurse Cynthia Billen. The couple married in 1975 and resided in various places in England over the decades. From 1995 to 2003, they lived in the US in Hanover, New Hampshire. Bryson later returned to England and became a British citizen. With his wife, he has four children.
