Alex Ross is a recording engineer. He has also worked as a music critic, writing for The New Yorker from 1996 and for the New York Times from 1992 to 1996.

His first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, is published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2007 and becomes a bestseller. It wins the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and it is a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Samuel Johnson Prize. The book also appears on the New York Times list of the ten best books of 2007.

Ross receives a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center, fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin and the Banff Centre, three ASCAP-Deems Taylor Awards, and a fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. In 2008 he serves as a McGraw Professor in Writing at Princeton University.

He is a native of Washington, DC, lives in Manhattan, and marries actor and filmmaker Jonathan Lisecki in 2005.