Mike Sager

Sager was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, to Beverly Rosenberg and Marvin Miles Sager—from, respectively, Culpeper and Fredericksburg, Virginia. The family, along with younger sister Wendy, eventually settled in Baltimore, Maryland. Sager graduated from Pikesville High School in 1974. At Emory University he played varsity soccer; served as president of his fraternity, Tau Epsilon Phi; was selected to Phi Beta Kappa; and was an editor of several school publications, including the college's literary magazine and weekly newspaper The Emory Wheel. where he served under Henry Schuster, a lifelong friend who would go on to become an award-winning producer at CNN and CBS 60 Minutes

After failing the spelling and typing tests administered by the human resources department of the Washington Post, Sager managed to land a lesser position as a copy boy on the 7 p.m. — 3 a.m. graveyard shift. Eleven months later, working in his off-hours as a freelancer, Sager broke an investigative story about abuses at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, his first front-page article at the Post. That evening, he was called into the glass office of then-metro editor Bob Woodward and promoted to staff writer.

More than a dozen of his articles have been optioned for or have inspired Hollywood feature films, including Boogie Nights, starring Mark Wahlberg, Wonderland, starring Val Kilmer, and Veronica Guerin, starring Cate Blanchett. Betrayed by Love, starring Patricia Arquette and Mare Winningham, premiered as a television movie. In 2012, The Marinovich Project, a documentary based on Sager's Esquire article and featuring Sager as a narrator, aired on ESPN.

A former Washington Post staff writer, Rolling Stone contributing editor, and writer for GQ, Sager has been a writer for Esquire for more than two decades. In 2010 he received the American Society of Magazine Editors' National Magazine award for profile writing for his story "The Man Who Never Was," which appeared in Esquire. He is the author of more than a dozen books and e-books, and has served as an editor on several journalism text books. More than a dozen of his articles have been optioned for or have inspired Hollywood feature films, including Boogie Nights, starring Mark Wahlberg, and Wonderland, starring Val Kilmer,. In 2012 The Marinovich Project, a documentary based on Sager's Esquire article and featuring Sager as a narrator, aired on ESPN. Sager has read and lectured at many American schools of journalism. In 2012 he founded The Sager Group LLC, a content brand the publishes books, makes film and video, and designs logos, products and other marketing tools.

For most of his career, Sager worked as an investigative and embedded journalist. In 2004 he released his first collection, Scary Monsters and Super Freaks, which became a Los Angeles Times bestseller, as did his next book, Revenge of the Donut Boys which was released in 2007. His first novel, Deviant Behavior, was published by Grove/Atlantic's Black Cat in April 2008. A third collection, Wounded Warriors, was published in October 2008 and received the Military Writers Society of America Founder's Award and the American Author's Association Golden Quill Award. Tattoos & Tequila: To Hell and Back with One of Rock's Most Notorious Frontmen, with Vince Neil, published in September 2010, was a New York Times best seller. His fourth collection, The Someone You're Not, was published by The Sager Group in October 2012, as was Next Wave: America's New Generation of Great Literary Journalists, edited with Walt Harrington. His second novel, High Tolerance, was published by The Sager Group in May 2013.The Devil and John Holmes-25th Anniversary Author's Edition: And Other True Stories of Drugs, Porn and Murder, was published in 2014.Stoned Again: The High Times and Strange Life of a Drugs Correspondent, was published by Byliner Selects in 2015. The Lonely Hedonist: True Stories of Sex, Drugs, Dinosaurs and Peter Dinklage, was published by The Sager Group in 2017. A second edition of Revenge of the Donut Boys was issued by The Sager Group in 2018.

For the next several years, Sager wrote for Washingtonian and Regardie's magazines in Washington. While at Regardie's he wrote a monthly reported column called "Washington Beat." In 1987 he became a contributing editor of Rolling Stone; in 1993 he authored a regular column for Rolling Stone called "Living in the USA." In late 1993 Sager became a writer-at-large for GQ. He went to Esquire in 1997. He has also written for Vibe, Spy, Interview, and Playboy.

In 1984 Sager founded The Sager Group to publish independent books, and has published many works including Next Wave: America's New Generation of Literary Journalists and The Stories We Tell: Classic Tales by America's Greatest Woman Journalists which was recognized by Constance Hale as one of the best books on narrative journalism. In 2018, The Sager Group expanded into multimedia content including documentary, feature and web-based films. TSG Films is headed by Miles Sager.

In the fall of 1983, Sager took a leave of absence from the Post to travel around Asia and the Far East, doing journalism and seeing the world. For one story, he spent six weeks in Nepal with a group of doctors and medical students; they trekked to a region that had been settled by Tibetan Buddhist refugees and set up a medical clinic. While in Kathmandu, Sager interviewed Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, the King of Nepal, who would later die in a massacre with most of his family. Also on that trip, Sager would research his first piece for Rolling Stone, in Thailand, about expat Vietnam veterans. Upon his return, in early 1984, Sager resigned from the Post to pursue a career in magazines.

During his senior year at Emory, Sager studied creative writing with the noted author and jazz historian Albert Murray, who would have a profound influence on his writing style, introducing the notions of rhythm and music in the context of prose. That year he also interned at the alternative weekly Creative Loafing, his first taste of professional journalism. He received his BA in history in June 1978.

Mike Sager (born August 17, 1956) is a bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He has been called "the Beat poet of American journalism, that rare reporter who can make literature out of shabby reality."