Dan Chiasson was 9 years old in 1981, when Bernie Sanders won his first race for mayor of Burlington. He was 17 when Sanders left city hall in 1989 and 19 when Sanders was sworn in as Vermont’s lone U.S. House representative in 1991. A Burlington native who grew up on Colchester Avenue, Chiasson had a front-row seat to watch the improbable political rise of the avowed socialist from Brooklyn who transformed the Queen City physically, culturally and economically.
As mayor, Sanders enacted policies aimed at benefiting people such as Chiasson, the son of a single mother from a struggling, working-class household. As Chiasson explores in a new, unauthorized biography, Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician, Sanders championed tenants’ rights, revitalized Church Street and transformed the waterfront from an industrial wasteland into an international tourist attraction. His administration established some of the most impactful agencies and programs in the city’s history, including the Community & Economic Development Office, Burlington City Arts and Champlain Housing Trust.
Sanders made the “People’s Republic of Burlington” — a slogan once used by an opponent to deride his politics — into a more diverse and inclusive place, one with its own foreign policy. (At the height of the Iran-Contra arms trafficking scandal, for instance, he flew to Nicaragua to meet with then-president Daniel Ortega.) Sanders backed the city’s first-ever Pride parade and signed an ordinance banning discrimination against gay people, welfare recipients, the elderly and the disabled. He also created the Mayor’s Youth Office and 242 Main, a teen center and all-ages music venue beneath Memorial Auditorium that spawned countless local bands.
Under Sanders’ stewardship, Burlington’s arts and entertainment scene flourished. He brokered a deal to host the Atlantic Theater Company, created by playwright David Mamet and actor William H. Macy, in Burlington City Hall one summer. He brought a minor-league baseball team to town, the aptly named Vermont Reds. For the young and painfully shy Chiasson, an aspiring poet who lived across the street from the team’s stadium at Centennial Field, it was all exhilarating to watch.
Chiasson, 54, is now a successful poet, professor and chair of the English department at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. (His mother still lives in Burlington, so Chiasson routinely returns to the city.) The author of five books of poems and a sixth of poetry criticism, he’s won a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Pushcart Prize. His work, which is regularly published in the New Yorker, the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, was described by the Times’ Daisy Fried as “genially brainy, jokey, casually formal, sometimes essayistic and humorously oracular.”
Throughout his career as a professor, poet and critic, Chiasson always had a nonfiction book gestating. As Sanders gained national prominence in the 1990s and became a household name beyond Vermont’s borders, Chiasson was frequently asked by people who knew that he grew up in Burlington, “What’s Bernie really like?”
Beginning in 2022, after decades of recounting his Bernie stories, Chiasson began compiling them in earnest, along with hours of interviews with Sanders’ longtime friends, colleagues and associates. Bernie for Burlington tracks, as Chiasson writes, “a change within a change: the evolution of Bernie Sanders within the shifting political and cultural landscape of his adopted state of Vermont.”
As Sanders’ origin story — and Burlington’s as a modern progressive city — the book ends in the 1990s and doesn’t explore Sanders’ career in Congress or his presidential bids in 2016 and 2020. But as it traces the ideological roots of the most influential leftist in modern American history, the book — part biography, part first-person memoir — highlights why Sanders’ policy positions, largely unchanged for decades, continue to resonate with Americans.
Born just a few blocks from Sanders’ first apartment in Burlington, Chiasson tells the kind of stories that old-timers might share over breakfast at the Handy’s Lunch counter or beers at the St. John’s Club. He describes his first brush with Bernie, at age 9, when the then-mayoral candidate knocked on his door looking for votes. Chiasson’s grandparents, who considered Sanders a communist, were horrified — “Fidel Castro,” he writes, “in a household that revered General Patton.”
Chiasson first spoke to Sanders in September 1985 while hanging out with some of his skateboard buddies on Church Street.
“I think it was the first time Sanders had seen a skateboard, because he seemed genuinely curious and surprised,” Chiasson writes. “Within a year skaters were bounding off of every curb and platform on the Church Street Marketplace, and merchants led a crackdown. ‘Tell your parents to vote,’ Bernie said, waving off our teenage nonsense.”
Chiasson recalls another Sanders encounter, in June 1986, at Norwich University. Then a rising high school sophomore, Chiasson was participating in Green Mountain Boys’ State, a teen leadership program. Sanders was running for governor at the time, “shaking our hands and quizzing us about civics with a sarcastic attitude, and I was proud to tell my roommates that I’d often mixed it up with him.”
Sanders, 84, still lives in Burlington’s New North End, where he can be spotted strolling the bike path, roaming the aisles of Hannaford supermarket or engaging a constituent in a debate as spirited as any on cable news. He occasionally lives up to comedian Larry David’s portrayal of him as the grumpy great-uncle who, during a bar mitzvah toast, will unleash a tirade against the billionaires who are screwing over the working class. But Sanders rarely engages with the Vermont press or weighs in publicly on local issues anymore, though he supported his stepdaughter, Carina Driscoll, when she ran for mayor in 2018.
More often, he’s outside Vermont, banging the drum for the same populist agenda — universal health care, campaign finance reform, tuition-free education — that he’s espoused for more than half a century, while supporting the next generation of leaders who share those priorities.
For nearly a year, Sanders has been zigzagging the country on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, most recently stopping in Wayne, N.J. Last week, he joined union nurses on a New York City picket line in their fight to maintain safe staffing levels in the city’s largest hospitals. Then he held a town meeting with Dr. Stephen Leffler, CEO of University of Vermont Health, on the state’s health care crisis. And this week, following the tragic shootings of Minnesotans Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents, he called for, among other things, withdrawing “Trump’s domestic army” from Minnesota, repealing funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and redirecting the money to health care. Lest anyone think that Chiasson’s retrospective book marks the end of Sanders’ career, the ornery octogenarian shows no signs of slowing down.
Chiasson, meanwhile, is laid-back, erudite but humble, with the rugged, tousled look of a guy who just returned from a fishing trip to the Upper Peninsula. His vibe is that of your favorite college professor whose morning class you never missed, even with a hangover.
He arrived for a Seven Days interview, at Burlington Bay Market & Café on the waterfront, sporting a blue ball cap emblazoned with the name “Zohran,” swag from the political campaign of Zohran Mamdani. At 34, New York City’s newly elected democratic socialist mayor seems to be Sanders’ heir apparent. The Vermont senator officiated at Mamdani’s swearing-in ceremony earlier this month, highlighting his continued relevance as the elder statesman of American progressive politics.
Bernie for Burlington comes out on February 3 and features a cover illustration by Bolton cartoonist Alison Bechdel. At nearly 600 pages, it’s a long but lively read. In an interview, Chiasson described the book as “a work of literature, not a work of reportage.” And, given its personal tone, it was a passion project, too, with enough references to local friends and colleagues that the New Yorker’s recent book review referred to the author as “the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon of Burlington.”
Many people probably will be surprised that a poet wrote a Sanders biography.
The poet is surprised as well. You don’t associate poets with 600-page nonfiction books. But I see the fact that I became a poet from a working-class background to be a direct outcome of Bernie’s transformation of this city. There was so much support for the arts here. The book has a lot of personal memoir in it because I see myself as an outcome of this American experiment.
What policy or program of Sanders had the biggest impact on you?
The obvious answer would be the arts office [later Burlington City Arts] and the Mayor’s Youth Office. I partook in a lot of things, including the early days of 242 Main. But as a single narrative moment, it would be going to hear Allen Ginsberg read in Memorial Auditorium in February 1986, which was the first poetry reading I ever attended, sponsored by the Mayor’s Council on the Arts. Ginsberg, who was doing a chanting, spoken-word style of poetry, was backed by musicians that included a couple of the guys from Phish. That was when I was just taking an interest in poetry, so it was a direct intervention in my life from Sanders’ city hall.
Were there things that Bernie did as mayor that you disagreed with?
I was, of course, a teenager and very wrapped up in the glamour and romance of what was happening in the city. But in the book I’m occasionally critical of things he did. The Alden Plan [in the mid-1980s] was going to transform the city and privatize a lot of the waterfront —and Bernie definitely supported it.
Did you ask Bernie to sit down for an interview for the book?
We made a couple of half-hearted attempts early on, but it’s a little hard for me to imagine him having been involved. And I don’t know what we would have done if he had said yes, because it would have been a very different book. I don’t think he’s interested in framing politics biographically.
Why not? Many politicians use their own rags-to-riches story for political gain.
Absolutely. Even stories about his own mother’s congenital heart condition could have really breathed life into some of his long-standing policy positions. I really don’t know. His older brother, Larry, who was a source for me and a wonderful, open-hearted person, is so nostalgic that he can barely get a sentence out without weeping. He’s kind of the caretaker of the family stories. But Bernie is not interested in being known that way.
It’s often said that Bernie’s politics haven’t changed over time. Did you find things about him that have changed?
I think so. He had some pretty eccentric policy positions when he was a Liberty Union Party candidate. Today, for example, I don’t think he would argue for children’s suffrage, which he used to argue for.
Bernie now works within the Democratic Party fold, which he never would have done in the ’80s. There was a moment where it looked like he was going to be brought into the Democratic Party through the Rainbow Coalition, who backed his 1986 and ’88 campaigns for governor and then for U.S. House. He didn’t do it, but when he got to Washington, I think he realized that to get anything done, he had to work with somebody. The main thing is: He has very intelligently optimized his message for national and eventually digital politics.
What did you learn about Sanders that surprised you?
His arguments about economic fairness are part of a much larger argument about human prosperity. He said in an interview — not with me — that it wasn’t his parents’ precarious economic state that troubled him. It was all the fighting and the way it eroded their relationship. His brother told me that their apartment was so tiny, with three and a half rooms, that the boys didn’t have any privacy and the parents didn’t have any, either. The implication was they really couldn’t have an intimate life as adults. So his economic justice arguments also imply a larger argument about the design for human happiness.
Bernie’s affinity with flinty Yankee Republicans I found very interesting and surprising. There’s a story about him as a young man going to Washington as a freelance writer for Vermont Life magazine and interviewing George Aiken, Vermont’s legendary U.S. senator. They got along great. Aiken really admired Bernie’s passion and loved the fact that Vermont was attracting talented and idealistic young people.
When did Sanders realize that he had to run for office in order to effect change?
I think from the start he was insistent that if you wanted to make change in the country, you had to be involved in electoral politics. He was very suspicious of performative activism. There are stories in the book about him showing up at a commune in the Northeast Kingdom and telling the strung-out hippies, “Man, you guys gotta clean up and run for the selectboard.”
Sanders was never a hippie himself. But you make the case that, had there not been the counterculture and Vermont’s back-to-the-land movement, his politics might have been different — and their politics wouldn’t have permeated the mainstream the way they did.
Vermont is unique in the country. You could go to Berkeley, Calif.; the Berkshires; West Virginia; and all the other places the hippies went. But Vermont is so small that you can go from school board to state rep and end up in the U.S. Senate, with an equal share of power as somebody who represents 20 million people.
There was a real opportunity when liberal Vermont Republicans found themselves without a home in the national Republican Party. That’s when Bernie’s independence from the Democratic Party made a real appeal to those mostly rural people. So the hippies played a role, but so did the disenfranchised Yankee Republicans.
Do you think Bernie would have gone further nationally had he not embraced the democratic socialist label?
I would have said so — until the rise of Mayor Mamdani in New York City. It appears that the tide has come around to Bernie’s way of thinking. “Democratic socialism” is not a term he always used. He always described himself as a socialist. But it was cut with a little bit of Yankee pragmatism and almost libertarian “Live and let live” stuff, which strategically he could have stressed a little more. I think he could have stressed in his campaigns what a pragmatic executive he was in the city of Burlington. He was a person that the business community trusted. They didn’t always see eye to eye, but they liked sitting down at the table with him and thought he was a straight shooter.
Did you seek out Sanders’ critics for the book?
I sought out some of his opponents. I spoke to former governor Howard Dean, who’s had a complicated relationship with him over the years. I spoke to former representative Peter Smith, who was his opponent in 1988 and defeated him just narrowly, and then Bernie won in a rematch in 1990. What’s interesting about those two guys, particularly Peter Smith, is that in some ways they’ve come around to Bernie’s way of seeing the world and his critique of power and inequity.
There were things about Bernie’s management style that come out in the book. There’s a memo that was given to me that was drafted by his entire administration in 1981 or ’82, confronting him about some of his interpersonal flaws. “Item one: You don’t smile at meetings.” So, he had his internal critics.
The book is not a canonization. He’s not the hero of every story. But he still comes out looking good.
Dan Chiasson
One reason I wasn’t disappointed to not have Bernie’s participation is that the book is not a canonization. He’s not the hero of every story. But he still comes out looking good.
Explain how you went about writing this book, which you’ve described as a collection of stories, not a work of history.
My method had to be personal. I tell a story in the book about [political columnist] Peter Freyne, who ate breakfast most mornings at Sneakers in Winooski, where I worked from the age of 12 on. Eventually I bused tables and would see and talk with Freyne. I guess I was 15 or 16. That’s very weird and hard to incorporate into a narrative that really is about Bernie Sanders. But I felt I had to try, and I’m happy with how it came out.
How can you tell the story of cultural and political transformation, for example, without talking about something like Bread and Puppet? Puppetry is a form of testimony, witness and political action. So is poetry. I have several passages in the book that consider poems as documents of the time, including some of my own, but also poems about Bernie’s Burlington by people like Allen Ginsberg.
The main sources for the book — people like [Jim] Rader, Richard Sugarman, Debbie Bookchin, Peter Clavelle, Peter Smith — I had multiple conversations with, in some cases hours and hours. Those conversations inevitably spawned others.
How did you approach the structure of the book?
I am an English professor, so I set out to write a work of literature. To represent a city as a dynamic organism, I revisited the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses. To write sentences with lots of detail and information but a rhythmic shape and arc, I read Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station and stuff by Henry Adams.
There are narrative challenges and opportunities in the story that I had to process. How do you tell a story with so many election-night scenes? There are, I believe, 10 chapters that revolve around elections. I realized that election-night scenes are great because they bring a lot of the cast together, a little like a ball in Tolstoy.
I tried to remember that I was writing a comedy, not in the sense of hilarious, but in the structural sense: obstacles, follies, mishaps, false starts and a big cast of vivid characters. I use Bread and Puppet as a kind of chorus. And it resolves not with a wedding, as in Shakespeare, but in an election-night scene.
At 84, Sanders likely won’t run for president again. Why do you think this book matters now?
The book ends with Sanders at his 1990 victory party predicting that “one small city, one small state” might lead a political revolution. We’re seeing that prediction play out now on the big stage in New York City and everywhere young democratic socialists are winning elections. So, Sanders’ movement traveled underground and now appears to be flowering in some exciting ways. There is no book yet about the astonishing campaign of Zohran Mamdani, which Sanders and his aides very closely mentored. But as a grassroots campaign story about energizing the electorate and building coalitions, mine has a lot to say about that New York City miracle.
What do you think other politicians can learn from Bernie Sanders?
Consistency, integrity, authenticity and a moral vision. Peter Clavelle, who was his successor [as mayor], told me that a city needs a moral visionary, and Bernie was a moral visionary. ➆
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Excerpt From Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician
When clips from the old public access cable program Bernie Speaks: The Mayor’s Show went viral early in Bernie’s second run for president in 2020, I started to see the faces of people I’d grown up with again, for the first time in decades, frozen as they were in the 1980s. Because the clips were so moving to me, I found the discourse surrounding them to be very annoying. Millennials and Gen Z Bernie supporters had constructed the historical Sanders as an adorably cantankerous young fogey, already the ranting uncle at the seder or birthday party. “That’s him in the middle?” Mero, of the late-night talk show Desus & Mero, asks his cohost. “Damn, he was one hundred then?” Sanders was an athletic-looking forty-five, and sitting, elbows resting on knees, on top of a picnic table surrounded by summer campers.
In the viral clip, Sanders asks the kids, who range from five to fourteen or so, about life back home at Franklin Square. “What about drugs, is that a problem?” Bernie asks. This was 1987, during Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s “War on Drugs.” Ostensibly to discourage us from a life of addiction, classrooms were plastered with images of fresh, delicious-looking scrambled eggs in a cast-iron skillet, below the slogan “This is your brain on drugs.”
One wiseacre sitting at Bernie’s ankles pipes up, “I LIKE COKE!” to a chorus of groans and guffaws from the other campers. This was a stock joke in classrooms and playgrounds in the 1980s, meant to trigger in adults Bernie’s stock response: “Who said that?”
The scoundrel — I think it’s my friend John Abair’s little brother Scott — then deals his final card, the standard coup de grâce: “What? I like Coca-Cola!”
“This is Bernie Sanders, the city’s socialist mayor,” Holly Otterbein wrote in Politico. And in the “at times startling” videos, “for some reason, he wants to talk about drugs.”
I can supply a few reasons. The kids are at day camp at the Ethan Allen Homestead, a few miles from their troubled home of Franklin Square, because Sanders and his administration scavenged the money to run the camp while heavy machinery built and installed the long-promised playground back home. That playground was the fruit of a yearslong battle that Bernie joined in part as a shrewd political gambit, in part because the development brought to mind the opportunities that such public works provided to his family in 1950s Brooklyn.
If you watch the whole clip, you see Sanders acting as an educator. His method is the opposite of Nancy Reagan’s see-ya-wouldn’t-wanna-be-ya Just Say No campaign. Some kids lean on him. He tousles one boy’s hair. He joshes with them and, when they become a little bananas, he sharpens his tone.
Sanders hands them tools for thought: “Are there any problems at Franklin Square?”
The kids, in unison: “NO.”
“Does everybody have enough money?”
More quietly, the children reply, “No.”
“And is that a problem?”
“Yes.”
There are then lessons in Vermont history, some light class analysis, and a pep talk about the importance of reading.
“Be sympathetic to your counselors,” Sanders tells the squirming kids. “I was a counselor once.” It is easy to believe.
Then one kid exclaims, “You look like that guy in Back to the Future! Not Michael J. Fox, the other one!”: Christopher Lloyd, in the role of “Doc” Brown, the wild-eyed scientist who retrofits a DeLorean to travel back to the year 1955.
The “Bernie video” that delighted his fans in 2020 is also a time machine. For it was at Franklin Square, on Halloween night in 1980, that Sanders’s political life started over.
Bernie Bits: Quirky Facts About Sanders From Bernie for Burlington
- Sanders first learned of his future home state as a 13-year-old in 1953, when his older brother, Larry, took him to a Vermont information bureau in midtown Manhattan that marketed “the virtues of Vermont.”
- Sanders attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn, whose other notable alumni include Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Chuck Schumer and Carole King. When he ran for class president, he finished last among three candidates, running on a platform of aiding orphans from the Korean War. But he was a standout student athlete, especially in track. His best time for the mile was 4:37, the third fastest in New York City in those years.
- One of Sanders’ major influences as a young man was Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Coiner of the phrase “the sexual revolution,” Reich marketed a pseudoscientific “orgone accumulator” that he claimed collected and focused libidinal life energy.
- Sanders bought his first property in Vermont in 1964 for $2,500: 85 acres in Middlesex that included several outbuildings, including a sugarhouse. There, he often cooked over an open fire or improvised Sterno rig, igniting T-shirts in an old coffee can — what his friends called “Berno.”
- In the 1970s, Sanders founded the American People’s Historical Society, a small but successful media company that produced filmstrips for schools and libraries throughout New England. He hired Canadian First Nations actor Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto in the television series “The Lone Ranger,” to narrate them.
- Sanders, who was notorious for driving old and unreliable vehicles, was a frequent hitchhiker. He once thumbed a ride from Burlington to a commune in West Glover to report on the phenomenon of home births.
- In 1972 as the Liberty Union Party candidate for U.S. Senate, Sanders once gave a stump speech to just one student, a reporter, at Castleton State College. That year, he won 2.2 percent of the vote.
- In the 1970s Sanders coached a Little League baseball team in Burlington made up of kids from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds.
- Sanders got involved in tenants’ rights in 1977, after getting his own eviction notice when his Burlington rent more than doubled and he withheld his checks in protest.
- Sanders earned statewide recognition in the 1980s, in part by recording and distributing a spoken-word album, called We Shall Overcome, backed by a gospel chorus. According to Chiasson, it “received generous, bemused airplay.”
- In 1976, when Sanders ran as the Liberty Union candidate for governor, he listed his total assets as $1,100, including his car and savings account.
- As mayor, Sanders often invited Bread and Puppet Theater to perform in Burlington. The troupe’s founder, Peter Schumann, once launched a papier-mâché effigy of Sanders out of a cannon.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Bernie’s Burlington | A new biography by Queen City native Dan Chiasson chronicles the rise of the ‘people’s politician’”
This article appears in January 28 • 2026.
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