Mitch Albom
Mitchell David Albom is an American author, sports journalist, talk show host and philanthropist. As of 2021, his books are reported to have sold 40 million copies worldwide. Having achieved national recognition as a sports journalist early on in his writing career, Albom turned to writing inspirational stories and themes—a preeminent early one being Tuesdays with Morrie.
Early life
Albom was born on May 23, 1958, in Passaic, New Jersey; he lived in Buffalo, New York, for a little while until his family settled in Oaklyn, New Jersey, just outside Philadelphia. He is Jewish. He graduated from Haddon Township High School in 1976.Albom earned a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1979 from Brandeis University. After forays into music and journalism, returned to academia to earn graduate master's degrees in journalism, and business. Albom paid his tuition in part through employment playing piano.
Career
As a 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 in Flushing, New York. His work there helped earn him entry into the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. To help pay his tuition he took work as a babysitter. In addition to nighttime piano playing, Albom took a part-time job with SPORT magazine. After graduation he freelanced as a sportswriter for Sports Illustrated, GEO, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and covered Olympic sports events in Europeincluding track and field and lugepaying 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 and 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 quickly became popular. In 1989, when the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News merged weekend publications, Albom was asked 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 in the Detroit Free Press.
Many of his columns have been collected into anthology books including Live Albom I, Live Albom II, Live Albom III, and Live Albom IV.
Albom also serves as a contributing editor to Parade magazine. His column is syndicated by Tribune Content Agency.
Game attendance error suspension
In 2005, Albom and four editors were briefly suspended from the Detroit Free Press after Albom wrote a column that stated that 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 April 3, 2005, edition, Albom described two former Michigan State University basketball players, both then 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 wrote that the players were there. But the players' plans changed at the last minute and they did not attend the game. The Detroit Free Press also suspended the four editors who had read the column and allowed it to go to print. Albom was in attendance at the game, but the columnist failed to check on the two players' presence. A later internal investigation found no other similar instances in Albom's past columns, but did cite an editorial-wide problem of routinely using unattributed quotes from other sources. Carol Leigh Hutton, publisher of the Detroit Free Press at the time of these events, later told BuzzFeed that she regretted the way it was handled. "It was a stupid mistake that Mitch made that others failed to catch but not at all indicative of some problem that required the response we gave it. I allowed myself to believe that we were doing this highly credible, highly transparent thing, when really in hindsight what I think we were doing was acquiescing to people who were taking advantage of a stupid mistake."As an author
As of 2021, Albom's books had sold over 40 million copies worldwide.Sports volumes
Albom's first non-anthology book was Bo: Life, Laughs, and the Lessons of a College Football Legend, an autobiography of 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 1993 and also became a New York Times bestseller.''Tuesdays with Morrie''
Albom's breakthrough book came about after he was rotating the TV channels and viewed 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. Albom, who was close to Schwartz during his college years at Brandeis University, felt guilty about not keeping in touch so he 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 out a publisher for a book about their visits. Although rejected by numerous publishing houses, Doubleday accepted the idea shortly before Schwartz's death, and Albom was able to fulfill his wish to pay Schwartz's bills.Tuesdays with Morrie, which chronicled Albom's time spent with his professor, was published in 1997. The initial printing was 20,000 copies. As word of mouth grew, the book sales slowly increased and landed the book a brief appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, nudging the book onto the New York Times Best Seller list in October 1997. It steadily climbed reaching the number-one position six months later. It remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for 205 weeks. One of the top selling memoirs of all time, Tuesdays With Morrie has sold over 20 million copies and has been translated into 45 languages. 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.
Oprah Winfrey produced a television movie adaptation by the same name 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.
''The Five People You Meet in Heaven''
After the success of Tuesdays with Morrie, Albom's follow-up was the fiction book The Five People You Meet in Heaven which he published in September 2003. It 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 became 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 18.7 million viewers.''For One More Day''
Albom's second novel, For One More Day, was published in 2006. It is about Charley "Chick" Benetto, 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, and in this way, the book explores the question, "What would you do if you had one more day with someone you've lost?".The hardcover edition of For One More Day spent nine months on the New York Times Best Seller list after debuting at the top spot, and reached No. 1 on the USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists. It has been translated into 26 languages. It was the first book to be sold by Starbucks in the launch of the Book Break Program in the fall of 2006.
On December 9, 2007, ABC television aired the two-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 performance in the role of Posey Benetto. 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, Albom's first nonfiction book since Tuesdays With Morrie, was released on September 29, 2009, through Hyperion publishing, and recounts Albom's experiences that led to him writing the eulogy for Albert L. Lewis, his rabbi who headed a synagogue in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, a town adjacent to Haddon Township, where Albom grew up. The synagogue later moved to Cherry Hill. 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 that he would one day eulogize. Through this experience, Albom writes, his own sense of faith was reawakened, leading him to make contact with Henry Covington, the African-American pastor of the I Am My Brother's Keeper church in Detroit, where Albom was then living. Covington, a past drug addict, dealer, and ex-convict, ministered to a congregation of largely homeless men and women in a church so poor that the roof leaked when it rained. From his relationships with these two very different men of faith, Albom writes about the difference faith can make in the world.On November 27, 2011, ABC aired the Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie based on the book.