O'Keefe, Kevin

PERSONAL: Born in Norman, OK; married; wife's name Kathy. Education: Auburn University, B.A.; Ohio University, M.A.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Office—LexBlog, Inc., 175 Parfitt Way, Ste. 125, Bainbridge Island, WA. E-mail—kevin@lexblog.com; kevin@theaverageamerican.com.

CAREER: Writer, attorney, journalist, marketing consultant, and Internet entrepreneur. Martindale-Hubbell (legal information provider), vice president of business development; Quintus (an international event management and television production company), managing director and head of West Coast offices, 1999–2001. LexBlog (a provider of professional marketing Web logs for the legal community), president and founder; Prairielaw.com (an online legal community for consumers and small businesses), founder. Worked in management in the professional sports industry and served as media and marketing consultant for Fortune 500 companies. Served as a trial lawyer, 1982–99. Guest on television programs, including CBS Evening News and Martha.

MEMBER: Association of Trial Lawyers of America, Washington state Trial Lawyers Association.

WRITINGS:

The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen, Public Affairs Press (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, including ESPN: The Magazine and American Profile.

SIDELIGHTS: Writer and journalist Kevin O'Keefe is a online entrepreneur, marketing consultant, and former trial attorney whose business ventures have focused on services for the legal field. He is founder of Prairielaw.com, an online legal community for consumers and small business owners, and is founder and president of LexBlog, a service provider of professional and marketing web logs for law practitioners and members of the legal profession. He successfully marketed his own legal practice while still serving as a trial lawyer, and has served as a manager, media consultant, and marketing advisor for a number of prominent business and Fortune 500 companies.

In his debut work of nonfiction, The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen, O'Keefe sets out to discover the one person in the United States who most thoroughly embodies the concept of the Average American. As a marketing executive, O'Keefe had used the term many times over the years, but when his book idea was born, he realized that neither he, nor anyone else, knew for certain what "Average American" meant. To begin his search, O'Keefe spent two years poring over statistical data and compiling averages of information and numerical data. In other cases, he made informed guesses as to what average meant in particular instances. Among the most telling statistics of average-ness were sex (male), height (five foot eight inches), weight (185 pounds), and a variety of cultural and social data points, such as the fact that the average person in America has nine friends, goes to church at least once a month, eats twenty-five pounds of candy a year, goes to bed before midnight, makes more money than his parents but not more than seventy-five thousand dollars per year, and is not, and does not want to be, famous. He found that the reality of "average" in the United States does not match the persistent concepts of bucolic, farm-dwelling rustics in the country's breadbasket. In the end, O'Keefe condensed his voluminous lists down to 140 critical characteristics, and from there embarked on his search to find the person who best embodied them all. He describes his journey and the people he met, the communities he encountered, and the distinctly American portrait that emerged from his research and travels.

"What a thoroughly delightful book," remarked Booklist reviewer David Pitt about The Average Ameri-can. Although O'Keefe does finally reveal the identity of the man who so thoroughly embodies the concept of the Average American, "the search itself," and O'Keefe's ruminations on the true meaning of being average, are what make "this curious book so illuminating and enjoyable," Pitt commented. Newsweek reviewer Nicole Joseph concluded: "The journey toward run-of-the-mill has never been so remarkable."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, November 15, 2005, David Pitt, review of The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen, p. 9.

Newsweek, October 31, 2005, Nicole Joseph, "Books: Here's Joe American," review of The Average American, p. 8.

ONLINE

Kevin O'Keefe Web log, http://www.blogger.com/profile/1605032 (April 14, 2006).

LexBlog, http://kevin.lexblog.com (April 14, 2006), Kevin O'Keefe's company Web site.

Average American Web site, http://www.theaverageamerican.com (April 14, 2006).