An American Jew
Steven Pressfield
A Writer Confronts his own Exile and Identity
Steven Pressfield grew up assuming he was like every other kid in his red-white-and-blue, Sunday-School attending, Christmas-tree decorating suburb. Then at age thirteen he found out he was in fact not a member of that tribe, but of a very different one.
Five decades later, in November 2011, Pressfield boarded an El Al jet bound for Israel. At long last, he'd committed to researching and writing The Lion's Gate, a book that would finally wrestle with the riddle of his own identity. What he learned as an artist and a man in the three years it took to complete the work is the subject of An American Jew, an on-the-front-lines account of the creative process . . . in all its wonderfully confounding forms.
Purchasing Options
“Deeply personal and profoundly moving . . . An American Jew has filled me with the love and pride for my brothers and sisters, the Children of Israel.”
- Randall Wallace, author of Braveheart and director of Heaven is for Real
Steven Pressfield grew up assuming he was like every other kid in his red-white-and-blue, Sunday-School attending, Christmas-tree decorating suburb. Then at age thirteen he found out he was in fact not a member of that tribe, but of a very different one. Five decades later, in November 2011, Pressfield boarded an El Al jet bound for Israel. At long last, he’d committed to researching and writing The Lion’s Gate, a book that would finally wrestle with the riddle of his own identity. What he learned as an artist and a man in the three years it took to complete the work is the subject of An American Jew, an on-the-front-lines account of the creative process…in all its wonderfully confounding forms.
If you're a reader of www.stevenpressfield.com, you already know more about Steve than his own family. So in lieu of a conventional bio, here are a few fun facts: 1. Steve and Shawn Coyne first met in 1998, when Shawn as an editor at Doubleday made an offer on Steve's historical novel Gates of Fire. Shawn was the only editor in New York to do so. Gates has gone on to sell more than a million copies. 2. It was Shawn who came up with the title, The War of Art, when his indie publishing house, Rugged Land, published the book in 2002. (Steve's title was The Writer's Life.) 3. The first person fired off the movie version of Steve's novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, was Steve himself. The film's producer, multi-Oscar-winner Jake Eberts, phoned Steve to inform him that the director, Robert Redford, had a writer of his own that he wanted to work with. Steve thanked Jake sincerely and profusely, explaining that this was the first time he had ever been fired off a project, where the individual doing the firing had the good manners to actually inform him of that fact—instead of Steve having to read about it in the trades. 4. Steve's literary agent for Bagger Vance (who also made the deal for Steve's latest novel, 36 Righteous Men, coming in 2019 from W.W. Norton) is Sterling Lord of Sterling Lord Literistic. Sterling is ninety-eight years old and going strong. In 1948 he made the original deal for Jack Kerouac's On the Road—for $900.