Anderson Cooper

Anderson Hays Cooper was born June 3, 1967, in Manhattan, the son of the artist and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt and the writer Wyatt Cooper, and a descendant of the shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, though the family fortune had thinned across five generations by the time he was born. His father died of heart failure during surgery in 1978, when Cooper was ten, and his older brother Carter died by suicide in 1988, jumping from the family's fourteenth-floor terrace while their mother stood nearby. Cooper has said watching Carter's death made him unafraid of danger in a way that shaped everything after it. He graduated from Yale in 1989, then talked his way into war reporting by forging a press credential and filming rebel-held Myanmar and Somalia.

Cooper worked his way from that freelance footage into ABC News by 1995, then joined CNN in 2001, where Anderson Cooper 360 launched in September 2003 and made him the network's lead anchor on international and disaster coverage. His reporting from New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, confronting officials on camera over the government's failed response, reset his public image from newsreader to advocate-adjacent correspondent. He covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and dozens of other disasters over two decades, moderated a presidential debate in 2016 as the first openly gay journalist to do so, and has co-hosted CNN's New Year's Eve broadcast for more than a decade. He has won 18 Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards, nearly all of it inside one network.

Cooper kept his sexual orientation private for most of his career, arguing a journalist's job was to report, not become the story, until he came out publicly in a July 2012 email that was published with his consent. Grief runs under nearly everything else in his public life: his father's death when he was ten, his brother's suicide when he was twenty-one, and his mother's death in 2019 left him, by his own account, unable to discuss any of it for decades, a silence he broke only in 2021 with a memoir and later a grief-focused podcast, All There Is. He became a father for the first time at 52, using a surrogate for both of his sons, a choice he has framed as breaking a pattern of absent or complicated parenting running through his own family.

Cooper is still anchoring Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN as of 2026, though he stepped away from his twenty-year run as a 60 Minutes correspondent earlier in the year to concentrate on the nightly broadcast. Whether cable news, a format many predicted would not survive the streaming era, keeps him as its last recognizable face, or whether his own audience migrates away from appointment television before his career ends, is a question still being decided in real time rather than one his record so far has answered.

Anderson Cooper's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Anderson Cooper 360 television
  CNN's flagship nightly newscast, anchored by Cooper since its launch 2003
• Hurricane Katrina coverage television
  On-air confrontations with officials that redefined his public profile 2005
• Dispatches from the Edge book
  Memoir of his early war and disaster reporting 2006
• The Rainbow Comes and Goes book
  Co-written correspondence with his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt 2016
• All There Is other
  Podcast on grief, launched after his mother's death 2021

• June 3, 1967 aged 0 Born in Manhattan
• January 5, 1978 aged 10 His father, Wyatt Cooper, dies during heart surgery
• July 22, 1988 aged 21 His brother Carter dies by suicide
• 1989 aged ~22 Graduates Yale and begins reporting from Myanmar on a forged press pass
• September 8, 2003 aged 36 Anderson Cooper 360 launches on CNN
• August 2005 aged 38 Reports from New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina
• July 2, 2012 aged 45 Comes out publicly as gay
• April 27, 2020 aged 52 His son Wyatt Morgan Cooper is born

• Cornelius Vanderbilt 1794–1877
  Shipping and railroad magnate whose empire made him one of the wealthiest Americans in history. descendant of
• Christiane Amanpour b. 1958
  CNN chief international correspondent who has covered wars and crises from the Balkans to the Middle East. CNN colleague
• Walter Cronkite 1916–2009
  CBS Evening News anchor known as the most trusted man in America during a pivotal era of broadcast journalism. measured against the broadcast-anchor tradition of
• Katie Couric b. 1957
  First woman to solo anchor a major network evening newscast and pioneering morning television host. contemporary network news anchor