Anderson Hays Cooper (born June 3, 1967) is an American journalist, author, and a television personality. He currently works as the primary anchor of the CNN news show Anderson Cooper 360°. The program is normally broadcast live from a New York City studio; however, Cooper often broadcasts live on location for breaking news stories.

Early life

Anderson Hays Cooper was born on June 3, 1967, in New York City, the younger son of the writer Wyatt Emory Cooper and the artist, designer, writer, and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, great-great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt of the prominent Vanderbilt shipping fortune.

Cooper's media experience began early. As a baby, he was photographed by Diane Arbus for Harper's Bazaar. Patricia Bosworth, "Diane Arbus: A Biography", NY: W.W. Norton, 1984 At the age of three, Cooper was a guest on The Tonight Show on September 17, 1970, when he appeared with his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt.The New York Times, September 17, 1970, page 95. From age 10 to 13, Cooper modeled with Ford Models for Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Macy's.

Cooper's father suffered a series of heart attacks, and died January 5, 1978, while undergoing open-heart surgery at the age of 50. This is said to have affected the young Cooper "enormously." He has said, in retrospect, "I think I'm a lot like my father in several ways," including "that we look a lot alike and that we have a similar sense of humor and a love of storytelling." Cooper considers his father's book Families to be "sort of a guide on...how he would have wanted me to live my life and the choices he would have wanted me to make. And so I feel very connected to him."Van Meter, Jonathan, "Unanchored," New York, September 19, 2005 (Retrieved on September 27, 2006).

During the second semester of his Senior year at the Dalton School, at age 17, Cooper went to southern Africa in a "13-ton British Army truck" during which time he contracted malaria and required hospitalization in Kenya. Describing the experience, Cooper wrote "Africa was a place to forget and be forgotten in."

Cooper's older brother, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper, committed suicide on July 22, 1988, at age 23, by jumping from the 14th-floor terrace of Vanderbilt's New York City penthouse apartment. Gloria Vanderbilt later wrote about her son's death in the book A Mother's Story, in which she expresses her belief that the suicide was caused by a psychotic episode induced by an allergy to the anti-asthma prescription drug Proventil. Carter's suicide is apparently what sparked Anderson to become a journalist:

Loss is a theme that I think a lot about, and it's something in my work that I dwell on. I think when you experience any kind of loss, especially the kind I did, you have questions about survival: Why do some people thrive in situations that others can't tolerate? Would I be able to survive and get on in the world on my own?