After graduating from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989, he began traveling the world, shooting footage of war-torn regions for Channel One News.

He developed a reputation for his on-the-ground reporting of breaking news events, with his coverage of Hurricane Katrina causing his popularity to sharply increase.

For his coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Cooper received a National Order of Honour and Merit, the highest honor granted by the Haitian government.

[4] In 2014, Cooper appeared in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Finding Your Roots, where he learned of an ancestor, Burwell Boykin, who was a slave owner from the southern United States.

Gloria Vanderbilt later wrote about her son's death in the book A Mother's Story, in which she expressed her belief that the suicide was caused by a psychotic episode induced by an allergy to the anti-asthma prescription drug salbutamol.

[12] During college, Cooper spent two summers as an intern at the Central Intelligence Agency while studying political science.

Finding it hard to get his foot in the door of on-air reporting, Cooper decided to enlist the help of a friend in making a fake press pass.

[16] Cooper then entered Myanmar on his own with his forged press pass and met with students fighting the Burmese government.

[15] After reporting from Myanmar, Cooper lived in Vietnam for a year to study the Vietnamese language at the University of Hanoi.

The anchorman on The Simpsons is a reasonable facsimile of some anchors who have that problem.In 2005, Cooper covered the tsunami damage in Sri Lanka; the Cedar Revolution in Beirut, Lebanon; the death of Pope John Paul II; and the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.

[citation needed] In 2005, during CNN coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he confronted Sen. Mary Landrieu, Sen. Trent Lott, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson about their perception of the government response.

"[18] In September 2005, the format of CNN's NewsNight was changed from 60 to 120 minutes to cover the unusually violent hurricane season.

This arrangement was reported to have been made permanent the same month by the president of CNN's U.S. operations, Jonathan Klein, who has called Cooper "the anchorperson of the future".

[23] In 2007, he began hosting CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute, a show about extraordinary deeds by ordinary people.

[citation needed] In October 2007, Cooper began hosting the documentary Planet in Peril with Sanjay Gupta and Jeff Corwin on CNN.

In 2008, Cooper, Gupta, and Lisa Ling from National Geographic Explorer teamed up for a sequel, Planet in Peril: Battle Lines, which premiered in December 2008.

[24][25] In September 2010, Warner Bros. and Telepictures (both corporate siblings of CNN) announced that Cooper had signed an agreement to host a nationally syndicated talk show.

The show, slightly renamed after season one and revamped with a variety of co-hosts, failed to achieve the ratings distributor Warner Brothers hoped for.

[citation needed] Along with Martha Raddatz, Cooper moderated the second presidential election debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

[citation needed] Andy Cohen and Cooper announced that they would be going on a national tour to perform their conversational stage show AC2 beginning in March 2015.

[40] Cooper was the narrator for the 2011 Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, directed by Rob Ashford and starring Daniel Radcliffe.

[41] A freelance writer, Cooper has authored a variety of articles that have appeared in many other outlets, including Details magazine.

[42] In May 2006, Cooper published a memoir for HarperCollins, Dispatches from the Edge, detailing his life and work in Sri Lanka, Africa, Iraq and Louisiana over the previous year.

Guests have included TV host Stephen Colbert, musician Laurie Anderson and comedian Molly Shannon.

On July 2, 2012, however, he gave Andrew Sullivan permission to publish an email that stated, in part:[55] I've begun to consider whether the unintended outcomes of maintaining my privacy outweigh personal and professional principle.

It's become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something—something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed or even afraid.

[56] In 2014, Cooper and his long-term partner at the time, Benjamin Maisani, purchased Rye House, a historic estate in Connecticut.

[58] Cooper was friends with Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef and host of the CNN series Parts Unknown.

He also went on to make an announcement on Instagram, stating that "Wyatt Morgan Cooper was born on Monday weighing 7 pounds 2 ounces.

[66] On February 10, 2022, Cooper announced at the beginning of his show on CNN that he had just become a father for a second time to a son named Sebastian Luke Maisani-Cooper.