Steven Pressfield

Pressfield was born in 1943 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, to a Navy father and mother.⁠[1]

He graduated from Duke University in 1965 with a B.A.⁠[1]

In January 1966 he left Parris Island as a newly minted U.S. Marine.⁠[1]

He has said he was a Marine reservist, trained as an infantryman, who never saw combat.⁠[2]

He has said his first job was in advertising in New York, including at Benton & Bowles; when his boss Ed Hannibal quit, wrote a novel and had an overnight success, he decided to try the same. He wrote three novels, each taking about two years full time, none of which was published.⁠[3]

He recalls that at about 28 or 29 he went back to North Carolina, attended a truck-driving school and became a long-haul driver, often delivering government cheese and other surplus food to rural churches; he also worked a season as a fruit picker, and later finished his third novel while driving a cab in New York. After none of the three novels was published, he turned to screenwriting.⁠[4]

His screen credits include King Kong Lives (1986), Above the Law (1988), Freejack (1992, with Ronald Shusett and Dan Gilroy), Army of One (1994) and Separate Lives (1995).⁠[5]

He recalls that his agent, Mike Warner, teamed him with another client, Ron Shusett, who generated and shepherded the ideas while Pressfield did the writing; he describes a screenwriting career of about ten years.⁠[3]

On May 1, 1995, Morrow/HarperCollins published his first novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, a 240-page book set in Savannah in 1931, in which World War I veteran Rannulph Junah, accompanied by the mysterious caddie Bagger Vance, plays an exhibition match against Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones.⁠[6]

He was 52 when the novel was published.⁠[2]

On October 21, 1998, Doubleday published Gates of Fire, his novel of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, narrated by Xeones, a squire and the lone survivor on the Spartan side, to the historian of the Persian king Xerxes. The book was a Literary Guild and Military Book Club selection, and film rights went to Universal Studios.⁠[7]

Gates of Fire and his The Warrior Ethos both appeared on the U.S. Marine Corps Commandant’s Professional Reading List.⁠[8]

On April 4, 2000, Doubleday published the 432-page Tides of War, a novel of the Peloponnesian War and Alcibiades in which Jason, a friend of Socrates, tells the story of Polemides, the soldier who killed Alcibiades.⁠[9]

The film of The Legend of Bagger Vance opened in November 2000, directed by Robert Redford from a script by Jeremy Leven and starring Matt Damon, Will SmithWill SmithWill Smith is an American actor, rapper and producer. He began performing as the Fresh Prince before starring in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and films including Bad Boys, Men in Black and The Pursuit of Happyness. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for King Richard and co-founded entertainment company Westbrook.Open the full entry and Charlize Theron, with a running time of 125 minutes; critic Dave McCoy found it overly sentimental.⁠[10]

In 2002 Rugged Land published his nonfiction book The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle.⁠[5]

On May 21, 2002, Doubleday published his 432-page novel Last of the Amazons.⁠[11]

On October 19, 2004, Doubleday published the 368-page The Virtues of War, a first-person account of the life of Alexander the Great that opens in 326 BC before the Battle of the Hydaspes, with Alexander recounting his life to the young Itanes.⁠[12]

In 2006 Doubleday published the 354-page The Afghan Campaign, which follows Alexander’s three-year campaign to subdue Afghanistan through the eyes of a young recruit. A review praised his ability to re-create ancient battle but found the characters weak and criticized the use of the ancient conflict to comment on U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.⁠[13]

On April 15, 2008, Doubleday published the 368-page Killing Rommel, a novel based on real events in the North African campaign of World War II, narrated by the young British officer Chapman, about a Long Range Desert Group mission to kill the German general Erwin Rommel.⁠[14]

In January 2011 he and the editor Shawn Coyne launched the publishing company Black Irish Books with an e-book and paperback reprint of The War of Art, the book they had worked on together in 2001; Coyne recalls getting advice from Seth Godin and says Pressfield came up with the company’s name.⁠[15]

Black Irish Books takes “Get in the ring” as its motto and publishes on fighting the inner war against “Resistance,” meaning fear, self-doubt, procrastination, arrogance and perfectionism.⁠[16]

On June 14, 2011, Crown published the 304-page The Profession, a thriller set in 2032 whose protagonist, Gentilhomme, is a mercenary for a military-contracting firm to which the United States outsources overseas combat.⁠[17]

On May 6, 2014, he published The Lion’s Gate, a nonfiction account of the 1967 Six Day War built mainly from participants’ oral histories and interwoven with biographical passages on the Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan, a form he called a “hybrid history.”⁠[18]

Published by Penguin/Sentinel at 448 pages, it draws on 63 hours of his interviews with Israeli soldiers; one review called it colorful and informative but one-sided.⁠[19]

He never interviewed Dayan, who died in 1981, and instead reconstructed his voice from Dayan’s writings and speeches and from interviews with his family and contemporaries; he acknowledges in the book that he has at some points “crossed the line into pure speculation.”⁠[20]

On November 5, 2019, Norton published the 352-page thriller 36 Righteous Men, set in New York in 2034, in which NYPD detectives pursue a killer targeting 36 men whose deaths are meant to bring about the end of the world.⁠[21]

On June 20, 2020, he appeared on episode 102 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, titled The War of Art; the outline covers the nature of war, the struggle within, mortality, the muse, editing, resistance, loneliness, whether a warrior is born or trained, and his daily ritual.⁠[22]

On March 2, 2021, Norton published the 336-page A Man at Arms, set in the Roman Empire in AD 55, in which the mercenary Telamon of Arcadia is sent after a letter written by Paul the Apostle.⁠[23]

His memoir Govt Cheese, about the years before his first novel, was scheduled for December 30, 2022.⁠[2]

By December 2022, Gates of Fire and The War of Art had each sold over a million copies.⁠[2]

On May 26, 2026, Norton published the 320-page The Arcadian, in which Telamon reappears in 16th-century Spain as an itinerant tool sharpener who protects the farm girl Mariah.⁠[24]

X: Public account: https://x.com/SPressfield (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

United States Marine Corps: Official website: https://www.marines.mil/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Black Irish Books: Official website: https://blackirishbooks.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[16]