He is the author of five books, including This Land: America, Lost and Found, a collection of his national columns for The Times that was published in 2018.
Barry, whose father was from Brooklyn and whose mother was from County Galway, Ireland, was born in Queens, N.Y., and raised in Deer Park, N.Y.
[citation needed] In 1983, after years working as a delicatessen clerk and ditch digger, Barry joined The Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn., as a reporter, and moved to the Providence Journal-Bulletin in 1987.
[citation needed] Barry lives in Maplewood, NJ, with his wife, Mary Trinity, and two daughters, Nora and Grace.
· Pull Me Up (2004) — memoir of Barry's Long Island Irish Catholic upbringing and battle with cancer · City Lights: Stories About New York (2007) — collection of Barry's "About New York" columns · Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game (HarperCollins, 2011; paperback March 2012) — about the longest game in professional baseball history · The Boys in the Bunkhouse: Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland (HarperCollins, 2016) – about the exploitation of a group of Texas men with intellectual disability who worked for decades in a turkey-processing plant in eastern Iowa · This Land: America, Lost and Found (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2018) – a collection of Barry's national "This Land" columns.