True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee

Praise

“Thunderous.”—The New York Review of Books

“Illuminating . . . A well-researched, engrossing and compulsively readable book.”—Los Angeles Times

“Tantalizing . . . Riesman puts in the hard yards to separate fact from myth.”—Dorian Lynskey, The Spectator

“Revelatory.”—USA Today

“An illuminating and reliable account of Lee’s improbable odyssey.”—Jacob Heilbrunn,
Washington Monthly

“Striking . . . True Believer paints a portrait of a man who was just as flawed as his heroes, and he emerges all the more human for it. . . . [Riesman is] a must-read chronicler of the comic book industry.”—The Hollywood Reporter

“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

“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 Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back

“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.”—Sarah Weinman, author of The Real Lolita

“Stan Lee was, all at once, a genius, a schlepper, a hack, a huckster, a marvel. 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.”—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

“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 Hail Satan?

“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.”—Leon Neyfakh, co-creator of Slow Burn and Fiasco