James Geary is the author of Wit's End: What Wit Is, How It Works, and Why We Need It (W.W. Norton), I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World (HarperCollins), and Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists (Bloomsbury). His book about aphorisms, The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism, was a New York Times bestseller. An expanded second edition will be published by the University of Chicago Press in November 2025.

Geary is an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, the former deputy curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, and the former editor of the European edition of Time magazine.