Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

TRUE BELIEVER

Abraham Riesman

The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee

Biography of the legendary Marvel Comics creator and impresario, based on extensive new interviews and research, from Lee's modest upbringing as the child of Jewish immigrants in NYC through his creative heyday, transformation into an international celebrity, and tumultuous final years.

In his decades as the face of Marvel Comics, Stan Lee brought to the fore now-legendary characters like Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, Iron Man, and Black Panther and built a brand that has changed global culture - but at what cost?
Building on more than 150 exclusive interviews and thousands of pages of rare documents, TRUE BELIEVER: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee charts the full, nearly 96-year arc of a life driven by unending ambition to reach the top, often with disastrous consequences. Although it acknowledges Stan's formidable skills and impact, this explosive and incisive biography pulls no punches when it asserts that Stan may not have created the characters he said he created, explores the lengths he went to in order to gain fame and fortune, reveals the rotting fraud at his post-Marvel businesses, and unravels the mysteries of his tragic final days.

This is the definitive biography of Stan Lee and will include rare archival photos of Lee and his family and will ta a look at a legend whose failures are as fascinating as his successes.

Abraham Riesman is a reporter for New York magazine, where he writes about arts and culture. His work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, and Vice, among others. He lives in New York City.

Available products
Book Published 2021-02-16 by Crown
Book Published 2021-02-16 by Crown

Comments

Well-researched and thorough. Read more...

A serious look from someone who holds an abiding love for Lee's work, without letting it blind a critical, journalistic eye.

This detailed, clear-eyed examination pulls back the curtain on one of America's great storytellers and is sure to reignite debates over Lee's legacy.

True Believer is a biography that reads like a thriller or a whodunit. It's an exploration of an often farcical tragedy: the life, afterlife, and death of a salesman and an editor who dreamed of being something more. It unwraps Stanley Leiber the man and Stan Lee the invention and the brand name, and manages to be scrupulously honest, deeply damning, and sometimes even heartbreaking.

A life rich with unexpected turns and a biography filled with personality. In looking at a man who created heroic stories for a living, Riesman bravely examines the trace lines underneath the legends of his life. The result is a startling, fresh portrait of a truly American career.

A significant contribution to comics history scholarship... It's a book that anyone concerned with the hard truths of human nature and the business of popular culture over the last 80 years needs.

Take it from someone who has always found comic books alluring but knew next to nothing about the medium's history before reading True Believer: this book will pull you in no matter what level of knowledge or built-in curiosity you bring to it. Riesman's rendering of Stan Lee's life and persona is self-contained in that way: he lays out the stakes with care and patience, wrings universal truths from the hyper-specific, and maintains an authorial voice that is both friendly and wise. It feels as though Stan Lee and the people with whom he surrounded himself live inside this book their ambitions, talents, grudges, and petty vanities all coming through with a vividness Riesman clearly earned through his research and reporting.

[A] serious biography... What [True Believer] does best is unfurl a Künstlerroman, a story about the growth of an art form and an artist, who was also a director and a leading man, unable to admit that the show could go on without him. Read more...

An illuminating and reliable account of Lee's improbable odyssey.

True Believer is in every imaginable way the biography that Stan Lee deservesambitious, audacious, daring, and unflinchingly clear-eyed about the man's significance, his shortcomings, his transgressions, his accomplishments, and his astonishing legacy.

The story of Stan Lee is a wild ride, sometimes breathtaking, often shocking - but it is also a wholly American one rooted in the transformation of hardscrabble reality into glorious dreams, of legends into truth, of absence into action, of immigration into assimilation. True Believer is a stunner of a biography that tracks the entirety of Stan Lee's work and life, the glories and the demons, and at heart, the profound sadness underpinning some of the most iconic pieces of entertainment in recent history.

For those who know Stan Lee from his sunny, funny cameos in Marvel films, get ready for an un-put-downable deep dive. The man lived a life - warts and all - and Riesman captures the shadow and sunshine in equal measure.

Article that Riesman wrote about Stan Lee for Vulture: IT'S STAN LEE'S UNIVERSE: He built Marvel Comics and laid the foundation for today's blockbuster superhero movies, and has changed pop culture as we know it. Here's how... Read more...

Stan Lee was, all at once, a genius, a schlepper, a hack, a huckster, a marvel. Abraham Riesman painstakingly dug into how much credit each of those overlapping personae deserves, and then he spun all those threads into a book that reads with the supple speed of Mr. Fantastic himself. It's a book about a comics universe and its creator, sure, but it's also about twentieth-century New York life, about Jewish America, about faking it till you make it and then maybe faking it a little more, about the creation of a global industry from literal pulp. Face it, reader: You just hit the jackpot!

True Believer is not only the closest we'll ever come to truly understanding the complicated, Lennon/McCartney-esque relationship between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but does a brilliant job of dissecting both the triumphs, and the hard truths from the myth that is Stan Lee.

Obituary that Riesman wrote about Stan Lee for Vulture: Stan Lee Gave More Than He Took... Read more...

Stan Lee was a mythmaker, both creatively and autobiographically. To reach the truth of his troubled and troubling life story, Riesman has had to peel away layers of quarrel, exaggeration, credit-grabbing, dispute, and faulty memory. The result is an enthralling, vibrantly written portrait of one of American popular culture's great innovators that is exacting and tough, sometimes angry, sometimes sad, but always searching and clearheaded.

Who was Stan Lee? To answer that question, Abraham Riesman balances warring sources, digs through a conflicted historical record, and pulls together the interwoven history of comics, the Jewish people, and the American culture Lee transformed. Not since the Daily Bugle's Ben Urich figured out Daredevil's secret identity in Daredevil #164 has a reporter dug deeper to solve a comics mystery, or woven a better story from the results.

True Believer is a powerhouse biography that doesn't pull any punches - giving readers a front-row seat to Stan Lee's many four-color glories and myriad failures. It's an honest, unsparing, meticulously researched, and masterfully written look at one of the most influential figures in all of pop culture. Not just a superb book about comics, Riesman's work is an essential read for anyone interested in the art storytelling and the cutthroat nature of the entertainment industry. Don't miss this book.

Every truly great American is also truly flawed, but acknowledging those flaws as engines of creativity helps illuminate what drives greatness. With True Believer, Abraham Riesman unpacks the brilliant, but troubled life of a person that changed our culture, and the world. There's a lot of hard truth in this book, but that's what makes it vital to understanding an American genius like Stan Lee.

Brazil: Editora Globo ; Italy; Rizzoli Lizard ; Russia: Eksmo ; Spanish (W): Es Pop Ediciones ; Ukraine: KM Books

I loved this book! True Believer is an epic journey from 19th century Romania to 21st century Hollywood, jam-packed with carefully compiled evidence of just how much delectable bullshit, staggering failure and vicious backbiting goes into the making of a great American genius. I genuinely could not put it down.

Journalist Riesman unpacks the minutiae-gnarled debates swirling around comics writer and producer Stan Lee (19222018) in his eventful, myth-dispelling debut, while also telling a story that will resonate even for those who don't know Spider-man from the Red Skull.