Eric Schlosser is an American journalist and author. His most famous book to date is Fast Food Nation, a muckraking exposé on the practices of the fast food industry, especially focusing on its sanitary conditions and treatment of workers. Fast Food Nation evolved from a two-part article in Rolling Stone Magazine. He has also written Reefer Madness, a book about the three biggest sectors of the American black market: marijuana, migrant labor and pornography. As an aspiring playwright Schlosser wrote the play Americans in 1985. Though it deals with the theme of American imperialism at the beginning of the 20th century, the piece has been given new relevance by international events involving the US in recent years.

He was born in Manhattan, New York and spent his childhood there and in Los Angeles, California. He studied at Princeton (American History) and Oxford (British Imperial History). After working for a New York film company, he began a journalism career with Atlantic Monthly in Boston, Massachusetts. He now lives in Manhattan.