I have written a Hugo- and Eisner-nominated biography for Penguin Random House’s Crown imprint called True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, which is now available for purchase. It’s the first complete and unvarnished account of the life of Stan Lee, the writer/editor who brought Marvel Comics to the world, changed global popular culture, and became an unmistakeable icon, only to watch his life shatter into operatic tragedy.
Based on more than 150 exclusive interviews and thousands of pages of archival material, True Believer’s narrative stretches from Stan’s ancestral trauma in eastern Romania to his shocking final days in Los Angeles. Along the way, it digs into many unsettling questions: Did Stan actually create the characters he gained fame for creating? Was he complicit in millions of dollars’ worth of fraud at his post-Marvel companies? Which members of the cavalcade of grifters who surrounded him were most responsible for the misery of his final days? And, above all, what drove this man to achieve so much, yet always boast of more?
Click here to buy.
Click here for an excerpt.
Click here for the official author interview.
Here’s some praise for the book:
“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 Lieber the man and Stan Lee the invention and the brand name, and manages to be scrupulously honest, deeply damning, and sometimes even heartbreaking.” —Neil Gaiman
“A serious biography … Unfurls 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.” —The New Yorker
“Has the thunderous sweep of a Kirby epic, beginning with the Romanian pogrom that traumatized Lee’s young father and ending with the pitiful Götterdämmerung of Lee’s last quarter-century … Riesman is relentlessly debunking.” —J. Hoberman, The New York Review of Books
“Illuminating … A well-researched, engrossing and compulsively readable book. It’s also brutal.” —The Los Angeles Times
“Revelatory … One need not be a comics nerd to find Riesman's portrait of the deeply flawed and relatably human pop-culture icon an absorbing read, and some of its revelations are stunning.” —USA Today
“Tantalizing … Riesman puts in the hard yards to separate fact from myth.” —Dorian Lynskey, The Spectator
“Lively and insightful … An excellent dig below the geniality that shows casual fans who he really was.” —The Washington Post
“Riesman is merciless in his documentation of Lee’s untrustworthiness … Yet even at his most critical, Riesman has to acknowledge the charm and chutzpah of the man.” —Roz Kaveney, The Times Literary Supplement
“An illuminating and reliable account of Lee’s improbable odyssey.” —Jacob Heilbrunn, Washington Monthly
“Striking … [Riesman is] a must-read chronicler of the comic book industry.” —The Hollywood Reporter
”Eventful and myth-dispelling … Detailed and clear-eyed … A story that will resonate even for those who don’t know Spider-Man from the Red Skull.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A book that anyone concerned with the hard truths of human nature and the business of popular culture over the last 80 years needs … A significant contribution to comics history scholarship.” —Forbes
“The best Jewish biography of 5781 … An engrossing must-read for anyone who has interacted with anything Marvel in their life.” —Alma
“About as fair, about as well-researched, and about as well-written as one could ask for from a book about Stan Lee.” —ComicBook.com
“For those who know Stan Lee from his sunny, funny cameos in Marvel films, get ready for an unputdownable deep dive. The man lived a life—warts and all—and Riesman captures the shadow and sunshine in equal measure.” —Patton Oswalt
"It's a book worth getting, kids … Abraham's a really good journalist, so it's not a hit-and-run job, by any stretch of the imagination. But it's definitely a warts-and-all story." —Kevin Smith
“True Believer is in every imaginable way the biography that Stan Lee deserves—ambitious, audacious, daring, and unflinchingly clear-eyed about the man’s significance, his shortcomings, his transgressions, his accomplishments, and his astonishing legacy.” —Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road
“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." —Mark Harris, author of Five Came Back and Mike Nichols: A Life
“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." —Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita
"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!" — Chris Bonanos, author of Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous
“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.” —Nathan Heller, author of The Private Order
“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.” —Isaac Butler, co-author of The World Only Spins Forward
“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." —Penny Lane, director of Listening to Kenny G
“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.” —Leon Neyfakh, co-creator of Slow Burn and Fiasco
”You can’t understand American culture without understanding Stan Lee, and Abraham Riesman’s dogged reporting uncovers the story of this remarkable huckster, fibber, and genius (of sorts). Riesman is just as canny as I expected him to be about Stan’s skyrocketing early career; what amazed me was the care and good humor with which he researched and told the very weird story of Stan’s latter-decades fizzle. (Not to mention his nearly unbelievable ascendance into the pantheon.) A vivid portrait of the power—and limits—of chutzpah.” —Dan Kois, author of How to Be a Family
“Every truly great American is also truly flawed, but acknowledging those flaws as engines of creativity helps illuminate what drives greatness. With True Believer, Riesman unpacks the brilliant but troubled life of a person who changed our culture, and the world.” —Jason Diamond, author of Searching for John Hughes and The Sprawl
“A remarkable act of reporting, writing, and myth-busting that will surprise even the most obsessive Marvel fan. Abraham Riesman gives us the real Stan Lee, untangling lawsuits, settling feuds, and finding the occasional burst of genius. (No, I'm not talking about Stripperella.)” —David Weigel, author of The Show That Never Ends
“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.” —Alex Segura, author of Miami Midnight
“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.” —Mike Ryan, senior entertainment writer, Uproxx