Mike Sager

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." Currently he is a Writer-at-Large for Esquire.

A former Washington Post staff writer and Rolling Stone contributing editor, 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, published in 2003, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, as was his second,Revenge of the Donut Boys, published in 2007. His first novel, Deviant Behavior, will be published by Grove/Atlantic's Black Cat in April, 2008. A third collection, Wounded Warriors, will be published by Da Capo Press in Fall, 2008.

Early life

Sager was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 17, 1956, to Beverly Rosenberg and Marvin Miles Sager-- who hailed, respectively, from Culpepper 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 varsity soccer; 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.

During his senior year at Emory 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, D.C. and began attending Georgetown University Law Center. He quit after three weeks to pursue a career in writing.

Newspapers

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 "news aid" at the paper-- Sager managed to land a lesser position as a copy boy on the graveyard shift. Eleven months after that, working in his off hours as a freelancer, Sager broke an investigative story about abuses at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, his first front page article at the Post. That evening, he was called into the glass office of then-Metro Editor Bob Woodward and promoted to staff writer.

Over the next five years, under the supervision of publisher Donald Graham, who had taken an interest in Sager as the first white male to work his way up from copy boy to reporter in twenty years (future executive editor Len Downie had been the last), Sager moved 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. 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 lap top, in its case it resembled a portable sewing machine; the screen was six by six inches and the printer used specially designed, silver-colored cash-register tape.

Breakthrough

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.

Magazines and film

For the next several years, Sager wrote for Washingtonian and Regardie’s magazines in Washington. While at Regardie's he wrote a monthly reported column called "Washington Beat." In 1987 he became a Contributing Editor of Rolling Stone; in 1993 he authored a regular column for Stone called "Living in the USA". In late 1993 Sager became a Writer-at-Large for GQ. He went to Esquire in 1997. He has also written for Vibe, Spy, Interview, and Playboy.

Eight of his articles have been optioned for or have inspired Hollywood feature films, including Boogie Nights, starring Mark Wahlberg, Wonderland, starring Val Kilmer, and Veronica Guerin, starring Cate Blanchett. Betrayed by Love, starring Patricia Arquette and Mare Winningham, premiered as a television movie.

"Literary anthropology"

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, Faye Dunaway, Evel Knievel, Roseanne Barr, Alan Arkin, and Rod Steiger.

Academics

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, the actress and teacher Rebekah Alfred Sager, and their son, Miles, in La Jolla, California.

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)

External links

• Official Website
• UCI profile