Mike Sager

Early life

Sager was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 17, 1956, to Beverly Rosenberg and Marvin Miles Sager—who hailed, respectively, from Culpeper and Fredericksburg, Virginia. Eventually the family, along with younger sister Wendy, would settle in Baltimore, Maryland. Mike 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

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.

That fall, Sager moved to Washington, D.C. to attend the Georgetown University Law Center. He dropped out after three weeks to pursue a career in writing.

Newspapers

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.

Over the next five years, under the supervision of publisher Donald E. Graham, who had taken an interest in Sager as he worked his way up from copy boy to reporter, Sager moved though the ranks from night police, to cops and courts, to night rewrite, to general assignment, most of that time under Graham’s former Harvard roommate, city editor Herb Denton. Along the way, Sager would be assigned to work with newly arrived editor Walt Harrington, who asked him, upon their first meeting, "Have you ever read Tom Wolfe?" The epiphany of reading Wolfe’s primer, The New Journalism, would follow shortly thereafter. (Harrington would go on to author several books, most notably Intimate Journalism, that have been used as primers in universities nationwide. He subsequently served as dean of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's College of Media.) In time, Sager became a roving feature writer, charged with covering rural Virginia, a role he would later liken to that of a foreign correspondent.

Breakthrough

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 be gunned down by his own son. 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.

Magazines and film

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.

Eight 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.

"Literary anthropology"

Over the years, Sager has practiced a form of journalism that some have called "literary anthropology." For his stories, he has lived with a crack gang in Los Angeles; a 625-pound man in El Monte, California; teenage pit bull fighters in the Philadelphia barrio; Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; heroin addicts on the Lower East Side; Aryan Nations troopers in Idaho; U.S. Marines at Camp Pendleton; Tupperware saleswomen in suburban Maryland; high school boys in Orange County. Since the late nineties, when he moved to California, he has also done dozens of celebrity profiles, including Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Kirk Douglas, Julia Child, Ray Charles, Faye Dunaway, Evel Knievel, Roseanne Barr, Alan Arkin, and Rod Steiger. He has been credited with being the pioneer of Esquire's well known feature, "What I've Learned."

Academia and The Sager Group

Sager has read and lectured at many American schools of journalism, including Columbia University, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of Missouri, Marquette University, and in many other forums, ranging from the Monarch School for Homeless Children to the Yale Law School. His work is included in three textbooks presently in use in college classrooms. For four years he led a popular writing workshop at the University of California, Irvine, where he was a Pereira Visiting Writer. Currently he is engaged as a faculty mentor with Goucher College's MFA/Creative Nonfiction program. He lives in La Jolla, California. His son is Miles Jacob Sager.

In 2012 The Sager Group was chartered as a consortium of multimedia artists and writers. TSG publishes books; manages musical acts and produces live shows; ministers to artists and provides modest grants; and produces documentary, feature, and web-based films. It can be found at TheSagerGroup.Net