[1] McGinniss attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains and then was educated at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, graduating in 1964.

After his application to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism was rejected, something he later pointed to with pride,[1] he became a general assignment reporter at the Worcester Telegram.

"[1] McGinniss's first book, The Selling of the President 1968, landed on The New York Times Best Seller list when he was 26 years old, making him the youngest living writer with that achievement.

[4]The book was well received by critics and has been recognized as a "classic of campaign reporting that first introduced many readers to the stage-managed world of political theater.

"[4] Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, who served as a Richard Nixon campaign adviser and featured prominently in the book, said in a statement that McGinniss "changed political writing forever in 1968.

"[5] It "spent more than six months on best-sellers lists ... and McGinniss sold a lot of those books through television, appearing on the titular shows of Merv Griffin, David Frost, and Dick Cavett, among others.

"[4] Conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr., "assumed McGinniss had relied on 'an elaborate deception which has brought joy and hope to the Nixon-haters.'

In the 1980s and early '90s, McGinniss wrote a trilogy of bestselling true crime books, Fatal Vision, Blind Faith and Cruel Doubt.

After a six-week civil trial in 1987 that resulted in a hung jury, his publisher's insurance company chose to settle out of court with MacDonald for a reported $325,000.

Described as "suspenseful and engrossing reading, with a courtroom drama that is cathartic as well as gripping" by Anne Rice in The New York Times, it was followed by Cruel Doubt (published by Simon and Schuster in 1991).

[13] "It is, by a wide margin, the worst book I have reviewed in nearly three decades; quite simply, there is not an honest page in it," wrote Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post.

[20][21] In 2009, McGinniss signed a contract to write an unauthorized biography about Palin and began research which took him to Alaska that fall and again in the spring of 2010.

[22][23] On her Facebook page, Palin warned him to stay away from her children and mused: "Wonder what kind of material he'll gather while overlooking Piper's bedroom, my little garden, and the family's swimming hole?

[24][25] McGinniss responded that there was no view of anyone's bedroom from the rental house and suggested that Palin should have simply come over with a plate of cookies and had a civil discussion with him.

In The Washington Post, Gene Weingarten called The Rogue "thin and crappy and lazy, filled with poorly sourced innuendo.

"[33] In 1995, McGinniss was awarded a $1 million advance as well as a media seat at the O. J. Simpson murder case, expecting to write a book about it.

[36] Lloyd Grove wrote that "in good times and bad, he threw himself headlong into an unforgiving, brutal but seductively rewarding line of work.

[40][41] As news of McGinniss' death spread, several tributes and obituaries were published in publications such as The New York Times,[1] Associated Press,[42] The Washington Post,[43] The Dish,[44] and others.

The New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan wrote: The phrase 'sui generis' – in a class of his own — seems to have been made for Joe McGinniss.