True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee

Overture

What It Takes

We cannot know for certain whether Sofie and Zanfir Solomon saw the celebrity when he returned, but we may presume they got word of his arrival soon enough. It was the bitter winter of 1899 and the couple were in their mid-thirties, married for sixteen years and raising a growing nest of children. Their home county, Vaslui, was a sparsely populated chunk of land in eastern Romania, containing just over 110,000 people, roughly 6,800 of them Jews like the Solomons, all of them struggling through a devastating recession. But even in the long, bleak nights, there was cause for excitement in the local Jewish community: The prodigal son was on his way.

For months before, if you had put your ear to the ground, you might have heard the distant rumble of his approach, and Vaslui held not only its ear to the ground, but its breath, wrote Marcus Eli Ravage, a Vasluiander of the Solomons era. On the street, in the market, at the synagogue, we kept asking one another the one question, When will he arrive? At last, the long-anticipated landsman rode a midnight train into town, and on his finely tailored frock coat lay the scarcely visible dust of a place the Solomons may have heard of but could barely imagine; a place where the laws of the Old World didn t apply (perhaps even the laws of physics given that it was on the other side of the world, it was said that people walked upside down there); a place where a Jew could be whatever he saw fit to be. I had heard of people going to Vienna and Germany and Paris, and even to England for business or pleasure, but no one, to my knowledge, had ever gone to America of his own free will, Ravage continued. And yet here was one of their own, back from fourteen years in what they called Nev-York, decked out in finery such as they d never seen.

The streets were lined with craning, round-eyed, tiptoeing Vasluianders, open-mouthed peasants, and gay-attired holiday visitors from neighboring

Abraham Josephine Riesman is a Providence-based journalist, writing primarily for New York magazine about arts and culture. Her work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, and Vice, among other publications.

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,