My Story

Lives have turning points, or “hinges,” as some people say. For me, two such turning points happened within weeks, and as a result, I had a sense of purpose and the skills I would need to live that purpose. Although I certainly didn’t understand that at the time.

As my sophomore year at Amherst College was ending, I was invited to the Classics Department’s annual year-end party. It was the 1970s, so there were no rules. And classicists, at least at Amherst, had a reputation for out drinking every other department on campus. I had never tried shots of tequila, lime, and salt before. I don’t think I felt the first eight or nine. The tenth or eleventh hit home, though, and by the twelfth or fourteenth—if you can remember how many you had, you didn’t have that many—I actually silenced the entire room and swore that since they were the greatest people in the world, I would become a Greek major in my last two years at school. My drunken word became my sober bond. I did four years of Greek over the next two years and completed a major in ancient

Greek alongside my previously planned major in English literature.

Let me tell you what it means to study ancient Greek. You are in small classes ranging from two to nine people. You are responsible for translating 40 lines of text from, say, Plato, Sophocles, Aristophanes, or Herodotus three times a week. You must then come to class prepared to be called on to explain any one of those 40 lines. Greek is complicated. A word could be a noun, a verb, singular, plural, any of four cases, and so on. Because Greek is an “inflected” language, words don’t have to go in the correct order. Inflected means that the endings of the words tell you whether they are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, or what have you, and whether they are singular, plural, male, female, and so on.

A line like “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” in Greek could appear as “compare day thee I shall summer’s”—and since they didn’t have punctuation, good luck figuring out that it’s a question. So, to study Greek, you need a magnifying glass and a Sherlock Holmes cap because you are not just a reader, you are also a detective. You are putting together puzzles within puzzles. I had a study partner, and she and I would work for about four hours together in the student lounge, trying to crack the code on each of those 40 lines, three times a week. Then we would each go back to our own dorm rooms and spend another three hours polishing what we had done. The idea of letting down our professor by not having precise knowledge of every single syllable was unthinkable. So that’s how I spent my last two years of college, and the summer between junior and senior year—staring intently at 120 lines of Greek every week.

What did I learn? First, to ask, in any given situation, how important will this be in 2,500 years? That is the kind of perspective you get when you are studying literature that old.

Second, the ability to sit still and stare at words. Diamond cutters work with diamonds. Jewelers work with precious metals. Writers work with words, our jewels, our precious metals. I learned to sit there and stare at those words and understand with the utmost level of clarity and precision exactly what had been written 25 centuries earlier.

When my mom came up to visit, we had coffee with my Greek advisor, who asked her, “How does it feel to have a son who is studying dead languages?” The implication was that there was nothing less marketable than what I was doing. It transpires that nothing could have been further from the truth. Sitting there and staring at Greek for all those endless hours turns out to have been the perfect preparation for what I do now. I still stare at words. I still aim for the utmost level of clarity and precision. Of course, these days, the words are all in English, which makes life considerably easier.

A month after my Greek bacchanal, I clerked for a small civil rights law firm in Midtown Manhattan. One morning, they sent me to deliver some papers to the New York State Office Building on 125th Street in Harlem. I had never been to Harlem before, and I must admit the subway ride to 125th Street was an uneasy experience for me-year-old from the suburbs. I found the building and the correct office where I was supposed to deliver the papers.

The woman behind the counter, who was Black and probably in her 50s, studied me, which felt odd. She suddenly exclaimed, “Your father is Emil Levin!”

I could not have been more shocked.

“Emil Levin is my grandfather!” I replied, astonished that she could have seen any resemblance between my grandfather, who, in my mind, was an old man, and me, a kid of 20.

My grandfather had been in politics and community service for almost half a century. He was involved in philanthropy, race relations, the State of Israel, mental health organizations, the Y … you name it. He had even run for Congress twice, unsuccessfully. Some of my earliest memories include visiting his campaign headquarters and riding on his sound truck in the 1964 election when I was six years old. I actually gave him some really brilliant campaign advice.

“If the voting is tied when the polls close,” I told him, with all the confidence a six-year-old can muster, “that’s when you go up and vote. That way, you will win.”

The advice didn’t help, but my grandfather was subsequently appointed to the New York State Human Rights Appeals Board, which heard cases relating to racial discrimination in housing and employment. His office was on the82nd floor of a building you may have heard of, the World Trade Center.

But now, here I was, face to face with a woman who not only knew my grandfather but could see his features in mine.

“Your grandfather is a good man,” she told me. “Your grandfather is for the people.”

The experience was stunning and far more than I had bargained for when I took the subway from Midtown toHarlem. I now had a standard by which to live my life. Like my grandfather, I, too, would be “for the people.”

But how?

I fell in love with books when my father read me Ask Mr. Bear, a children’s book, before bedtime. The idea that someone would take your words, your thoughts, and then bind them into a book and send them out into the world …even as a little kid, I found the concept mind-blowing!

Fast forward to third grade. The school librarian, Miss Wood, as she was known (it was the 1960s, people) was incredibly frightening and stern if you lost a library book. I lost plenty, so I should know! One day, she showed our class a film strip about how books were created. One image depicted an author reviewing his galleys, his manuscript laid out in page form, the last step before publishing.

That’s me, I told myself, and that has been me throughout my entire adult life.

Books are magic. They entertain, they educate, they tell stories, they bring clarity, and they help make people better at life. Writing is all I’ve ever wanted to do, and I’m incredibly blessed that this is how I make my livelihood, how I serve. And yes, I knew it from that day in third grade. Thank you, Miss Wood!

The first time I ever published anything was in 1972, when I was 14 and fascinated by politics. I wrote a short letter to Time Magazine after the appointment of Henry Kissinger to the position of Secretary of State. “Sir,” my letter began, “Mr. Kissinger lends a touch of class to a very unclassy Administration.”

Well, Time considered my opinion worthy of sharing with the world, and my mind was blown all over again. I followed up with letters to Newsweek and The New York Times. You see your name and words in print in a national publication, while still a teenager, and you start thinking, maybe I can do this.

When I was 16, I attended a summer program in London where we got to meet playwrights and directors. Tom Stoppard, fresh from his success with a play called Travesties, came to our class and had lunch with us. Nice young guy. Wonder whatever became of him. The most remarkable moment of that summer, however, was visiting a bookstore that no longer exists, Foyle’s Annex, where they only sold Penguin paperbacks. On the walls were caricatures of the great authors they published, including James Joyce, William Faulkner, and George Orwell, and I was struck by what seems like the most obvious thing in the world, but to me, it came as a thunder clap. These authors were actual human beings. They weren’t gods on Mt. Olympus tossing down manuscripts like thunderbolts. They were people. I was people. Maybe I could be one of them. Maybe …

I went to Amherst College, where I majored in English and Ancient Greek, and also studied French, Latin, andMiddle English. I fell in love with words and sentences. That is what nerds do, we fall in love with words and sentences.Girls and drinking and all that, but primarily words and sentences. In the evenings, I would sometimes wander the stacks of the college library, said to contain half a million volumes. I would stare at all those books and ask myself, could I conceivably be a worse writer than all half million of those authors? Even if I was at the bottom of the list, surely, I was in there somewhere. Wasn’t I?

I wrote for the student newspaper, and one night, while we were putting the paper to bed, our offices were taken over by one of the student groups. It was the 70s; that’s what one did. There were about 16 to 18 editors, and we all crammed into the chairman’s office, as the senior editor was known, to discuss how we would cover our own takeover in the next day’s edition.

I started taking notes for the story. There was never any discussion; it was just sort of assumed by all present that I would write the cover story about the takeover for the next day. When I was done writing the story, it hit me. Those kids at Amherst were really smart. Really good writers. By contrast, I got in off the waiting list by the skin of my teeth, and not because of my grades or SATs. And yet, they all understood that I was the writer to be entrusted with that story. That blew my mind.

While at Amherst, I subscribed to The New York Times. Everybody did back then, or so it seemed. It was probably $5 for the entire school year to have the paper delivered to your dorm room. One morning, during my junior year, I was reading an opinion piece and found myself impressed by the writing and the points the author was making. Who was it? To my surprise, it was a college student, also a junior, at some other school. That got my attention. This kid is my age, and he’s published inThe New York Times? The summer after I graduated, I had an idea for an opinion piece. I was a huge Art Buchwald fan and wrote a story in his style. I submitted it—that means I typed it out and mailed it in an envelope with a stamp— to the opinion page editor. A few days later, the phone rang. It was an editor at the Times. They were publishing the piece. I drove into the city every night for a week to get the early or “bulldog” edition of the Times, to see if my story was there. And then, one night … August 22, 1980 … there it was. Seeing my name and my words … it felt like being hit by lightning all over again. I sent in another opinion piece two years later, and they published that one, too. And then that second piece ended up in a textbook on writing, alongside Plato and Woody Allen.

Despite all that, I couldn’t figure out how writers made a living, so I went to law school. Three years of law school, and then two stints of five months each at two firms. I was all but fired from the first firm and then fired from the second because they could tell I didn’t want to be there. My work product wasn’t great, my hours were low (but honest), and they could tell it wouldn’t work out with me. I tried to get a job at a third firm. I interviewed well and had a great resume, but once they called the prior firms for references, I was sunk and unemployable.

By then, I had sold two novels to Simon & Schuster and would soon sell a third. While thrilling, the money was low, and after a while, it ran out. I was literally a starving writer. At the same time as my Columbia Law School classmates were making partner at major firms in New York and elsewhere, I was literally on heating assistance because my income was below $13,000 a year. Not a party.

On January 31, 1994, I had $35,000 worth of credit card debt, $900 a month of minimum payments to make, and no income. I went to a recovery group that specialized in people like me who had problems with money and debt. I met a man who would mentor me for the next 29 years. He showed me how to start a business, which initially consisted of offering writing classes in a rented space; first, the yoga studio I attended and then, a meeting room in a church in Boston’s Back Bay. Some of my students asked if I would consult on their projects on an hourly basis, and that led to some of them saying, “Just write it for me.” And that’s how I literally backed into a career of ghostwriting and private biography.

According to Michael Gerber, who created the E-Myth business books, which have sold millions of copies over the decades, no one has created more successful books than I have. I have been called the “Michael Jordan of private biography.” So how do you end up doing all these books with celebrities, sports figures, broadcasters, top athletes, members of the Forbes List, billionaires, doctors, dentists, consultants, financial services professionals, and on and on?

When I tell you there was no plan, trust me, there was no plan. Instead, I was fortunate enough to build a ghostwriting practice that has encompassed more than 1,000 books in one shape or another over the past three decades—writing them, planning them, editing them, consulting on them, publishing them, and, in a few cases, agenting them. I still love words and sentences. I’m still a nerd. Capturing and disseminating ideas that make the lives of other people better – whether we are talking business and finance, body, mind, spirit and health, sports and broadcasting, consulting, or what have you—remains as thrilling to me today as it was the first time I put pen to paper.

Incredibly, it has been more than half a century since I sent Time Magazine that two-sentence letter praising Henry Kissinger. Why I sent it, I couldn’t have told you then, and I certainly couldn’t tell you now, but the thrill of seeing words and ideas in print never grows old. That’s how it has been for my clients, and I hope that’s how it will be for you, too.

Writing books for other people was never my career choice. In fact, it was a career I had never heard of, but it turns out there is really nothing better that I could have done with the last 35 years. I like to say that I only have two qualifications for clients—they have to be positive people with a positive message. That message might have to do with business and finance, medicine or dentistry, body, mind, spirit, or sports, or what have you.

Think about it like this. Over here, you have an individual with ideas that could transform the lives of countless people, if only they could be captured in book form. That person typically doesn’t have the time, the desire, or sometimes the ability to write his or her own book. And over there, you have a specific audience—what Seth Rogan calls a tribe—of people whose lives would be improved if only they had access to this person’s thinking.

I get to stand in the gap.

I get to listen to the tribal leader with the ideas to share, while standing in the shoes of the reader, and then I get to express those ideas in the author’s voice so that they improve, benefit, uplift the life of the reader.

I have always called my job the greatest graduate school on the planet because I am constantly learning from the people who are the best in their fields. And then I get to turn around and share that knowledge with the audience that needs to hear from those individuals most. I’ve done my share of books with celebrities, broadcasters, and sports figures. I really don’t need to do another celebrity book. I’m much more interested in private individuals who have a wealth of knowledge that needs to be captured and shared, not as an act of vanity but as an act of service, so that the lives of their fellow men and women might be better.

I am humbled to say that the books I have written, planned, edited, or published have touched the lives of millions and millions of individuals and families.

I never saw that coming when I ghosted my first book.

I never saw it coming, the idea that I might be involved with more than a thousand books.

Alfred Hitchcock used to say that he made movies about ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances.That is what made them so relatable and compelling. In a way, you could say the same thing about my clientele. They are ordinary people in the sense that most of them are not instantly recognizable celebrities, or people with massive social media presences, for whatever that is worth.

Instead, they are people who have lived their lives as best they can, from a professional, community-minded, or spiritual perspective. And they have achieved extraordinary accomplishments. If they had a flock of birds chasing after them, they could be heroes in a Hitchcock film! The serious point is that these individuals have so much to share, and I get to serve as the force multiplier for their wisdom.

My grandfather, who was “for the people,” passed away before I started my ghostwriting career, although I was able to give him a copy of my first novel, The Socratic Method, which Simon & Schuster published in 1986, the month before he died. I never expected to be a private biographer, which is the term I use to describe what I do, but in my own small way, it is how I am for the people. The 20-year-old standing, shocked, in the New York State OfficeBuilding in Harlem back in 1978 would probably be surprised that this is the way he eventually found to be “for the people.” I would like to think he would be pleased. I know I am.