Mike Sager
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Mike Sager is a bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He has been called "the beat poet of American journalism, that rare reporter who can make literature out of shabby reality."[1] Currently he is a Writer-at-Large for Esquire.
A former Washington Post staff writer, Sager has had a rich and varied career chronicling the dark underbelly of the American scene and psyche. His first collection, Scary Monsters and Super Freaks: Stories of Sex, Drugs, Rock 'N Roll and Murder, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. His second collection, Revenge of the Donut Boys: True Stories of Lust, Fame, Survival and Multiple Personality, will be published by Avalon/Thunder’s Mouth in September, 2007. His first novel, Deviant Behavior, will be published by Grove/Atlantic in Winter, 2008.
Sager has won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for Distinguished Music Writing. He has been nominated 19 times by magazines for the American Society of Magazine Editors Ellie award; he has been a finalist once. His stories have been featured in fifteen collections, including Esquire's Big Book of Great Writings and Intimate Journalism, a textbook widely used in college journalism programs across America. Eight of his stories have been optioned for film, including his GQ piece about murdered Irish journalist Veronica Guerin (Bruckheimer, Disney), with Cate Blanchette playing the title role. His Rolling Stone story, "The Devil and John Holmes" served as inspiration for the movies Boogie Nights, starring Mark Wahlberg, and Wonderland, starring Val Kilmer.
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[edit] Biography
Sager was born in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 17, 1956, to Beverly Rosenberg and Marvin M. Sager-- who hailed, respectively, from Culpeper and Fredericksburg, Virginia. Marvin, a medical student at the University of Virginia, would go on to specialize in gynecology. Eventually the family, along with younger sister Wendy, would settle in Baltimore, Maryland. Mike graduated from Pikesville High School in 1974. At Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia, he played on the varsity soccer team; served as president of his fraternity, Tau Epsilon Phi; was selected to Phi Beta Kappa; and was an editor of several school publications, including the college's literary magazine and weekly newspaper. While a senior he interned at the alternative weekly Creative Loafing, his first taste of professional journalism. He received his BA in history in June 1978.
Following a summer spent driving across America in a puke-green VW camper van, Sager moved to Washington, DC and began attending Georgetown University Law Center. He quit after three weeks to pursue a career in writing.
Two months later-- after failing the spelling and typing tests administered by the human resources department of the Washington Post and being dismissed as a candidate for any job at the paper-- Sager managed to yutch his way into a position as a copy boy on the graveyard shift. Eleven months after that, working in his spare time, he broke a freelance investigative story about abuses at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was promoted to staff writer by Metro Editor Bob Woodward. Over the next five years, at the behest of publisher Donald Graham, who had taken an interest in Sager as the first white male of no discernable minority to work his way up from copy boy to reporter in over twenty years (future executive editor Len Downie had been the last), Sager worked though the ranks in old-school fashion, from night police, to cops and courts, to night rewrite, to general assignment, most of that time under Graham’s Harvard roommate, City Editor Herb Denton, who would later die of AIDS. Along the way, Sager would be assigned to work with newly-arrived editor Walt Harrington, who asked him, upon their first meeting, “Have you ever read Tom Wolfe?” The epiphany of reading Wolfe’s primer, The New Journalism, would follow shortly thereafter.
In time, Sager became a roving feature writer, charged with covering rural Virginia, a role he would later liken to that of foreign correspondent. In that job, Sager was equipped with first generation models of the modern tools of reportage: an early mobile phone-- talk time twenty minutes—and a portable computer-- hardly a lop top, in its case it resembled a portable sewing machine; the screen was six by six inches and the printer used special, silver-colored cash-register tape.
In the fall of 1983, Sager took a leave of absence from the Post to travel around Asia and the Far East, doing journalism and seeing the world. For one story, he spent six weeks in Nepal with a group of doctors and medical students; they trekked to a region that had been settled by Tibetan Buddhist refugees and set up a medical clinic. While in Katmandu, Sager interviewed Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, the King of Nepal, who would be later be gunned down by his own son. Also on that trip, Sager would write his first piece for Rolling Stone, in Thailand, about ex-pat Vietnam veterans. Upon his return, in early 1984, Sager resigned from the Post to pursue a career in magazines.
For the next several years, Sager wrote for Washingtonian and Regardie’s magazines in Washington. In 1987 he became a Contributing Editor of Rolling Stone; in 1992 he became a Writer-at-Large for GQ. He went to Esquire in 1997. He has also written for Vibe, Spy, Interview, and Playboy.
Over the years, Sager has practiced a form of journalism that some have called “Literary Anthropology.” For his stories, he has lived with a crack gang in Los Angeles; a 625 pound man in El Monte, CA; teenage pit bull fighters in the Philadelphia barrio; Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; heroin addicts on the Lower East Side; Aryan Nations troopers in Idaho; U.S. Marines at Camp Pendleton; Tupperware saleswomen in suburban Maryland; high school boys in Orange County. Since the late nineties, when he moved to California, he has also done dozens of celebrity profiles, including Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Kirk Douglas, Julia Child, Ray Charles, Fay Dunaway, Evel Knievel, Roseanne Barr, Alan Arkin, and Rod Steiger.
Sager has read and lectured at Columbia University's graduate school of journalism, the Medill School of Journalism, the Yale Law School, and many other forums; his work is included in three textbooks presently in use in college classrooms. Each spring, he leads a popular workshop at the University of California-Irvine, where he is a Pereira Visiting Writer. He lives with his wife and son in La Jolla, California.
[edit] References
- ^ Walt Harrington, Head of Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
[edit] Bibliography
- Scary Monsters and Super Freaks: Stories of Sex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll, and Murder, (New York : Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003, ISBN 1-56025-563-3)
- Revenge of the Donut Boys: True Stories of Lust, Fame, Survival and Multiple Personality, (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007, ISBN 1-56868-350-8)
- Deviant Behavior: A Novel, (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2008)
