Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom (born May 23, 1958)
is an American best-selling author, journalist, screenwriter,
playwright, radio and television broadcaster and musician. His
books have sold over 26 million copies worldwide. Having achieved
national recognition for his sports writing in the earlier part of
his career, he is perhaps best known now for the inspirational
stories and themes that weave through his books, plays and films.
He is also
well-known for his philanthropic work in Detroit,
Michigan
having
founded three charities there.
Family, childhood, and education
Albom was
born in Passaic, New
Jersey
and briefly lived in Buffalo, New York
before moving back to New Jersey
as a child. He has an identical twin by the
name of Terra Sunday Kenworthy.
After attending high schools in New Jersey
and Philadelphia, including Akiba Hebrew Academy
in Lower Merion, Albom went on to Brandeis
University
in Waltham, Massachusetts
to earn a bachelor’s degree in sociology.
Pursuing his dream to become a musician, he worked after graduation
for several years in nightclubs in the US and Europe. He discovered
an aptitude for writing and eventually returned to graduate school,
earning a Masters degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School
of Journalism, followed by an MBA from Columbia University’s
Graduate School of Business.
In 1995, he married Janine Sabino.
They live in suburban Detroit
, Michigan
.
Work
Early days as a musician
Albom’s original dream was to become a musician and song writer,
and he played in numerous bands in high school and college.
He studied
jazz piano with several teachers, including a brief stretch with
the well-respected Charlie Banacos
at the Berklee
College of Music
in Boston,
Massachusetts
. In 1979, having graduated from college,
Albom traveled to Europe and found work as a piano player and
singer in a taverna on the island of Crete.
He later moved to
New York
City
and worked in the music industry, forming several
bands and performing in various nightclubs, while also trying to
make it as a songwriter.
Columnist
While living in New York, Albom developed an interest in
journalism. Still supporting himself by working nights in the music
industry, he began to write during the day for the
Queens
Tribune, a weekly newspaper based in Flushing, New York. To
help build his portfolio, he wrote for local supermarket circulars.
Sticking with it, his work there helped earn him entry into
Columbia University's
prestigious Graduate School of Journalism. During his time there,
to help pay his tuition – in addition to nighttime piano playing -
Albom took a part-time job with
SPORT magazine, which
kindled his interest in sports writing. Upon graduation, he
freelanced in that field for publications such as
Sports
Illustrated,
GEO, and
The Philadelphia
Inquirer, and covered several Olympic sports events in Europe
– including track and field and luge - paying his own way for
travel and selling articles once he was there. In 1983, he was
hired as a full-time feature writer for
The Fort Lauderdale
News Sun Sentinel, and eventually promoted to columnist. In
1985, having won that year’s
Associated
Press Sports Editors award for best Sports News Story, Albom
was hired as lead sports columnist for the
Detroit Free
Press to replace
Mike Downey, a
popular columnist who had taken a job with the Los Angeles
Times.
Albom’s sports column became quickly popular with readers. In 1989,
when the
Detroit Free Press and the
Detroit News
merged weekend publications under a Joint Operating Agreement,
Albom was asked by his newspaper to add a weekly non-sports column
to his duties. That column ran on Sundays in the “Comment” section,
and dealt with American life and values. It was eventually
syndicated across the country. Both columns continue today in the
Detroit Free Press.
Albom, during his years in Detroit, became one of the most
award-winning sports writers of his era; he was named best sports
columnist in the nation a record 13 times by the Associated Press
Sports Editors, and won best feature writing honors from that same
organization a record seven times. No other writer has received the
award more than once. He has won more than 200 other writing honors
from organizations including the National Headliner Awards, the
American Society of Newspaper Editors, the National Sportscasters
and Sportswriting Association, and National Association of Black
Journalists. Many of his columns have been collected into anthology
books including
Live Albom I (Detroit Free Press, 1988),
Live Albom II (Detroit Free Press, 1990),
Live Albom
III (Detroit Free Press, 1992), and
Live Albom IV
(Detroit Free Press, 1995).
Albom also serves as a contributing editor to
Parade magazine.
Author
Sports books
Albom's first non-anthology book was
Bo: Life, Laughs, and the
Lessons of a College Football Legend (Warner Books), an
autobiography of legendary football coach Bo Schembechler
co-written with the coach. The book was published in August, 1989
and became Albom's first
New York
Times bestseller.
Albom's next book was
Fab Five: Basketball, Trash Talk, The
American Dream, a look into the starters on the University of
Michigan men's basketball team that reached the NCAA championship
game as freshmen in 1992 and again as sophomores in 1993. The book
was published in November 1994 and also became a
New York Times bestseller.
Albom’s breakthrough book came about after viewing Morrie
Schwartz’s interview with
Ted Koppel on
ABC News
Nightline in 1995, in which
Schwartz, a sociology professor, spoke about living and dying with
a terminal disease, ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou
Gehrig's disease). Albom, who had been close with Schwartz during
his college years at Brandeis, reconnected with his former
professor, visiting him in suburban Boston and eventually coming
every Tuesday for discussions about life and death. Albom, seeking
a way to pay for Schwartz’s medical bills, sought a publisher for a
book about their visits. Although rejected by numerous publishing
houses, the idea was accepted by Doubleday shortly before
Schwartz’s death, and Albom was able to fulfill his wish to pay off
Schwartz’s bills.
The book,
Tuesdays with Morrie, was published in 1997, a
small volume that chronicled Albom’s time spent with his professor.
The initial printing was 20,000 copies. Word of mouth grew the book
sales slowly, and a brief appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”
nudged the book onto the
New York
Times bestseller’s list in October 1997. It steadily
climbed, reaching the No. 1 position six months later. It remained
on the New York Times bestseller list for 205 weeks. Now the
bestselling memoir of all time, Tuesdays With Morrie has sold over
14 million copies and has been translated into 41 languages.
Oprah Winfrey produced a television
movie adaptation for ABC, starring
Hank
Azaria as Albom and
Jack Lemmon as
Morrie. It was the most-watched TV movie of 1999 and won four Emmy
Awards. A two-man theater play was later co-authored by Albom and
playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, and opened
off-Broadway in the fall of 2001, starring
Alvin Epstein as Morrie and Jon Tenney as Mitch.
Tuesdays With Morrie is regularly taught in high schools
and universities around the world and Albom started a private
foundation with some of the proceeds, The Tuesdays With Mitch
Foundation, to fund various charitable efforts.
After the success of
Tuesdays with Morrie, Albom's next
foray was in fiction. His follow-up book was
The Five People
You Meet in Heaven (Hyperion Books) published in September
2003. Although released six years after
Tuesdays With
Morrie, the book was a fast success and again launched Albom
onto the New York Times best-seller list.
The Five People You
Meet in Heaven sold over 10 million copies in 38 territories
and in 35 languages. In 2004, it was turned into a television movie
for ABC, starring Jon Voight, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Imperioli and
Jeff Daniels. Directed by Lloyd Kramer, the film was critically
acclaimed and the most watched TV movie of the year, with 18.6
million viewers.
The Five People You Meet in Heaven is the story of Eddie,
a wounded war veteran who lives what he believes is an uninspired
and lonely life fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his
83rd birthday, Eddie is killed while trying to save a little girl
from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns
that heaven is not a location but a place in which your life is
explained to you by five people who were in it who affected, or
were affected by, your life.
Albom has said the book was inspired by his real life uncle, Eddie
Beitchman, who, like the character, served during World War II in
the Philippines, and died when he was 83. Eddie told Albom, as a
child, about a time he was rushed to surgery and had a near-death
experience, his soul floating above the bed. There, Eddie said, he
saw all his dead relatives waiting for him at the edge of the bed.
Although the real Eddie survived the surgery, Albom has said that
image of people waiting when you die inspired his concept of The
Five People You Meet in Heaven
Albom's second novel,
For One More Day (Hyperion), was
published in 2006. The hardcover edition spent nine months on the
New York Times Bestseller list after debuting at the top spot. It
also reached No. 1 on USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestseller
lists. It was the first book to be sold by Starbucks in the launch
of the Book Break Program in the fall of 2006. It has been
translated into 26 languages. On December 9, 2007, the ABC aired
the 2-hour television event motion picture "Oprah Winfrey Presents:
Mitch Albom’s For One More Day," which starred Michael Imperioli
and Ellen Burstyn. Burstyn received a Screen Actors’ Guild award
nomination for her role as Posey Benetto.
For One More Day is about a son who gets to spend a day
with his mother who died eight years earlier. Charley “Chick”
Benetto is a retired baseball player who, facing the pain of
unrealized dreams, alcoholism, divorce, and an estrangement from
his grown daughter, returns to his childhood home and attempts
suicide. There he meets his long dead mother, who welcomes him as
if nothing ever happened. The book explores the question, “What
would you do if you had one more day with someone you’ve
lost?”
Albom has said his relationship with his own mother was largely
behind the story of that book, and that several incidents in
For One More Day are actual events from his
childhood.
Have a Little Faith
Have a Little Faith, which was Albom's first nonfiction
book since
Tuesdays With Morrie, was released on September
29, 2009 through Hyperion publishing, recounts Albom's experience
writing the eulogy for a Rabbi from his hometown. The book is
written in the same vein as
Tuesdays With Morrie, in which
the main character, Mitch goes through several heartfelt
conversations with the Rabbi in order to better know and understand
the man to ensure that the eulogy is true to his wishes.
Radio Host
Albom began on radio in 1987 on WLLZ-Detroit, a now-defunct classic
rock radio station. He worked on the station’s morning program as a
sports commentator, and started a Sunday night sports-talk program,
The Sunday Sports Albom in 1988, believed to be one of the
first sports talk shows to ever air on FM radio.
In 1996,
Albom moved to WJR
, a powerful,
50,000 watt clear-channel AM
station in Detroit. His five-day a week program is a general
talk show with an emphasis on
entertainment, writing, current events and culture. He has been
honored numerous times by the Michigan Association of Broadcasters
as the top afternoon talk show host, and was voted best talk show
host in
Detroit by Hour Detroit magazine. In 2001, the
show was televised nationally in a simulcast by
MSNBC. Albom continues to do the show from 5 to 7 p.m.
ET.
Television
Albom appears regularly on ESPN's
The Sports Reporters
(airs Sunday mornings from the ESPN Zone in Times Square at 10 a.m.
ET) and
SportsCenter. He has also made appearances on
Costas Now, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Today Show, CBS’s The
Early Show, ABC’s Good Morning America, Dr. Phil, and
Larry King Live.
Playwright
On November 19, 2002, the stage version of
Tuesdays with
Morrie opened
off-Broadway at the
Minetta Lane Theatre. Co-authored by Mitch Albom and
Jeffrey Hatcher (
Three Viewings)
and directed by David Esbjornson (
The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?).
Tuesdays with Morrie starred Alvin Epstein (original Lucky
in
Waiting for Godot) as Morrie and Jon Tenney (
The
Heiress) as Mitch.
Albom’s
follow up to the stage adaptation of Tuesdays were two
original comedies that premiered at The Purple Rose Theater, in
Chelsea,
Michigan
, a theater started by actor Jeff Daniels. Duck Hunter Shoots
Angel (The Purple Rose’s highest grossing play as of 2008) and
And the Winner Is have both been produced nationwide, with
the latter having its West Coast premiere at the Laguna Playhouse
in Laguna Beach,
California
.
Musician
Albom is an accomplished songwriter and lyricist. In 1992, he wrote
the song "Cookin' For Two" for a television movie,
Christmas in
Connecticut, directed by
Arnold Schwarzenegger. The song was
nominated for The CableACE Award. He also wrote the song "Hit
Somebody (The Hockey Song)", which was recorded by
singer/songwriter
Warren Zevon, with
David Letterman on backup vocals.
The song was released as a single in Canada and will be adapted
into a film by director
Kevin Smith,
which Albom is co-writing. He currently performs with the
Rock Bottom Remainders, a band of
writers that also features Dave Barry, Stephen King, Ridley
Pearson, Amy Tan and Scott Turow. Their performances raise funds
for various children’s literacy projects across the country.
Charity work
The Dream Fund
"The Dream Fund," established in 1989, provides scholarship for
disadvantaged children to study the arts.
A Time to Help
In 1998, Albom started a Detroit volunteer group called "A Time to
Help". Every month, the group (affiliated with Volunteer Impact)
does a project to help serve and improve the Detroit community.
Projects have included work at homeless shelters, food banks,
senior citizens homes, and a school for the underprivileged or
handicapped. Albom and radio co-host Ken Brown lead each project
and try to use the group as a catalyst to increase
volunteerism.
S.A.Y. Detroit
S.A.Y. (Super All Year) Detroit is an umbrella program that funds
shelters and cares for the homeless. It began in 2006 in reaction
to the city’s plan to provide temporary shelter for Detroit’s
homeless only during Super Bowl XL weekend. Albom spent a night in
a shelter to call attention to the issue, and as a result was able
to raise over $350,000 in less than two weeks. It is now a 501(c)3
nonprofit organization that funds numerous homeless shelters
throughout the Metro Detroit area.
In the spotlight
In the mid-1990s, during a hotly-contested strike at the
Detroit Free Press that gained national attention, Albom
crossed the picket line and returned to work.
In 1999, Albom was named National Hospice Organization's Man of the
Year.
In 2000, at the
Emmy
Awards, Albom was personally thanked by actor
Jack Lemmon during his acceptance speech for his
Emmy for Best Actor in a TV Movie or Miniseries for
Tuesdays
With Morrie. It would be Lemmon’s last major acting
role.
In February 2003, Albom was called to testify at
Chris Webber's perjury trial. Webber had been a
member of the University of Michigan's basketball teams of the
early 1990s. He was a member of the "Fab Five" players, the subject
of a book by Albom. Webber and three other Wolverines who played in
the 1990s were alleged to have received over $290,000 in improper
loans from a man considered to be a booster of the University of
Michigan, although amounts were never verified. The four other Fab
Five members were not implicated and the school was cleared of any
direct involvement or knowledge of the loans, which were made to
players and their families.
In 2005, Albom and four editors were briefly suspended from the
Detroit Free Press after Albom filed a column that stated
two college basketball players were in the crowd at an NCAA
tournament game, when in fact they were not. In a column printed in
the Sunday, April 3, Albom described two former Michigan State
basketball players, both now in the NBA, attending an NCAA Final
Four semifinal game on Saturday to cheer for their school. The
players had told Albom they planned to attend, so Albom, filing on
his normal Friday deadline but knowing the column could not come
out until Sunday – after the game was over - wrote the players were
there. The
Detroit Free Press also suspended the four
editors who had read the column and allowed it to go through to
print. But the players' plans changed at the last minute and they
did not attend the game. Albom was in attendance at the game, but
the columnist failed to check on the two players’ presence.
Albom issued an explanation regarding his misreporting and
apologized in print. The
Detroit Free Press launched an
investigation, and a probe of over 600 columns involving five
investigative reporters ultimately concluded that there was no
evidence of any other such incidents in the course of his career in
Detroit. In his return article, Albom again apologized for the
mistake and thanked his supporters. “I think I’d be a liar if I
said it was easy to have people checking on everything you’ve
done,” Albom told a Detroit TV station, “It hurts to have your
integrity questioned, especially when you’ve been at a place for 20
years and tried to make a career of having some integrity…But
sometimes it’s healthy to be humbled a little bit. I’m a smarter
person because of it.”
On November 22, 2005, Albom was the sole and final guest on
Ted Koppel's farewell appearance on ABC’s
“Nightline”. Koppel had gotten to know Albom through his broadcasts
with Morrie Schwartz and the final program dealt with the legacy of
those shows and Albom’s book.
In October, 2006, Albom’s third novel,
For One More Day
was chosen as the first book to be sold in
Starbucks. At Albom’s request, one dollar from
each book went to Jumpstart, a charity created to aid literacy in
underprivileged areas. On a single day, October 26, as part of the
promotion, customer-led book discussions were held in stores in 25
major markets, and Albom spoke, via phone, with all of them.
On October 22, 2007, Albom appeared with former New York Governor
Mario Cuomo and
Tony Bennett in “An Evening with Tony Bennett”
to honor the release of Bennett’s
Tony Bennett In The Studio: A
Life of Art and Music, for which Albom wrote the foreword. The
event was held at the Barnes & Noble Store in Union Square, New
York
On May
30, 2008, Albom delivered the commencement address at his nephew’s
high school graduation in Nice, France
. In July of that year, Amazon released the
speech exclusively on Amazon Kindle. Albom’s shares of the proceeds
were donated to his charity for the homeless, S.A.Y. Detroit.
Selected books
- Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's
Greatest Lesson (2002) ISBN 076790592X
- The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003) ISBN
0786868716
- For One More Day (2006) ISBN 1401303277
- Have a Little Faith: A True Story (2009) ISBN
0786868724
References
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