Nick Offerman Books In Order

Publication Order of Bedtime Stories for Cynics Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Nick Offerman
Nick Offerman was born in Joliet, Illinois on June 26, 1970, and grew up in the nearby town of Minooka. He’s the son of Cathy (nee Roberts) and Ric Offerman, who taught social studies at a junior high school in the nearby Channahon.

He attended Minooka Community High School, and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the year 1993. That same year, he and a group of his fellow students co-founded the Defiant Theatre, which was a Chicago based theatre company.

During the mid-1990s, he lived in Chicago, where he participated with theater companies like Wisdom Bridge, Steppenwolf, and Goodman. At Steppenwolf, he also worked as a fight choreographer and master carpenter. It was during this time that he became acquainted with Amy Poehler, who was heavily involved with the Chicago improv comedy scene.

Inspired writing has always been the most influential art form in his own life. Great stage plays as well as fantastic screenwriting, not to mention many of his woodworking education from periodicals, books, and, obviously, books. Books of all kinds continue to inform the development and direction of his own thinking, so it pleases him to no end that he’s had the chance to regurgitate such thinking in five of his own books for your reading pleasure. The fourth of which he wrote with his laudable bride, Megan.

In the year 2003, he married Megan Mullally, even appearing on her talk show, The Megan Mullally Show. The couple met while acting in “The Berlin Circle”, a play produced by the Evidence Room Theatre Company, and married after they dated for 18 months.

He and Megan have appeared on each other shows, with Megan playing his second ex-wife on Parks and Recreation, while he’s appeared on Will and Grace twice.

“Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man’s Fundamentals for Delicious Living” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2013. Nick shares his humorous fulminations on meat, life, and manliness, and so much more in his first book.

Grilling red meat, growing the perfect mustache, wooing a woman. Who better to deliver such tutelage than the always charming and always manly Nick Offerman, best known as Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation?

Combining his trademark comic voice and some very real expertise in woodworking, he runs his own wood shop, this features some stories from his childhood in small town Minooka. He talks of growing up in the middle of a cornfield, to his days in the Chicago theater, his beginnings as a carpenter/actor and the magnificent and hilarious seduction of Megan Mullally, his now-wife. The book also offers some hard-bitten strategies in the arenas of manliness, style, love, religion, woodworking, and outdoor recreation, among many other savory entrees.

A mixture of opinionated lessons and rants, amusing anecdotes, sprinkled with some offbeat gaiety, this book will not just tickle readers pink but also might rouse them to put their smart phones down, study just a few more sycamore leaves, and possibly even hand craft (and then paddle) their own canoes.

“Gumption: Relighting the Torch of Freedom with America’s Gutsiest Troublemakers” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2015. Nick humorously highlights twenty-one figures from our nation’s history, from her inception to the present. These are his own personal pantheon of “great Americans”.

To millions of people, Nick Offerman is America. Both Nick and Ron Swanson are known for their patriotism and humor in equal measure.

Offerman, after the major success of “Paddle Your Own Canoe”, is now focusing on the lives of the people that inspired him. From Willie Nelson to George Washington, he describes twenty-one heroic figures and why they inspire in him such great meaning. Nick combines both serious history with his light-hearted humor, comparing Benjamin Franklin’s abstinence from day drinking to his own sage refusal to join his construction crew in getting plastered while on the way to work.

The subject matter also allows for him to expound on his favorite topics, which his readers love to hear. Areas like philosophy, politics, religion, fashion, handcrafting and woodworking, creativity, and, obviously, meat.

“Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2016. Nick returns after two New York Times bestsellers, with the subject that he is best known for: his incredible real-life woodshop.

Nestled among the glitter and glitz of Tinseltown is a testament to American elbow grease as well as an honest-to-god hard day’s work: Offerman Woodshop. Captained by Nick Offerman, the shop makes not just fine handcrafted furniture, but also fun stuff such as: baseball bats, kazoos, ukuleles, and even mustache combs.

Now Nick and his ragtag crew of champions would like to share some of their experiences of working at the Woodshop, tell you about their passion for the discipline of woodworking, and teach people how exactly make a few of their most popular projects all along the way. This book is going to take the reader behind the scenes at the woodshop, both inspiring and teaching them how to make projects of their own and besotting them with the infectious spirit behind the shop and its complement of dusty wood-elves.

In each of these pages you are sure to find a variety of projects for every skill level, with accessible and personal instructions by the OWS woodworkers themselves. And, what’s more, this is tutelage that will be augmented by some mouth-watering color photos, which Nick refers to as “wood porn”. There are also writings by Nick, who offers up recipes for both comestibles and mirth, odes to his personal woodworking heroes, humorous essays, insights into the ethos of woodworking in modern America, as well as other assorted tomfoolery.

Whether you have been working in a shop of your own for years, or if you are holding this stack of compressed wood pulp is as close as you have ever come to milling lumber, or if you just love Nick’s brand of worldly yet bucolic wisdom, you are sure to find this is filled with entertaining, useful, and illuminating information.