From Sports Columns to the Book Shelves, Mitch Albom’s Writing Defies Stereotypes and Devaluation

Chona
Sep 1
3 min read

“You are a sportswriter. You don’t even know what a memoir is…” The words stung as Mitch Albom searched for publishers for his manuscript, Tuesdays with Morrie. His goal at the time was just to publish the book to help fund his dying sociology professor’s medical bills, but after it was published, it became one of the most celebrated memoirs to date. The first 20,000 copies have now become a whopping 20 million distributed worldwide.

Photo by Vincent Wagner

Born on May 23, 1958, Albom is the second of three children of Ira and Rhoda Albom. He is one of those you can consider an accidental writer. When you flip back some pages of his life, you can read that his first interest was becoming a cartoonist, but he found himself exploring a music career. Throughout his younger years, he was surrounded by musicians: his dad was a singer, and his uncle was a pianist (who taught him how to play the instrument). He would use his musicality to help him provide for his needs, but it was never long before he stumbled upon his career in journalism.

While working as a musician at night, Albom thought of using his spare time during the day as a volunteer writer in a weekly paper in Queens, New York. He didn’t have formal writing training when he first dipped a pen into a journalistic job. He did read a lot and had always been familiar with how the news is structured in the paper. (It was only later on that he would find out it was the inverted pyramid.) His bachelor’s degree, major in sociology, was earned at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he met the sage Morrie Schwartz, the adored subject of his Tuesdays with Morrie nonfiction book. Sixteen years after graduating, he would reencounter Morrie and would learn some of the best lessons he would have in his lifetime.

He eventually earned a Master of Journalism degree and an MBA in Columbia University, all while partly paying his tuition from his music gigs. After which, he then devoted his time in writing, working a freelance sports journalism job in Sports Illustrated, GEO, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. In time, he became a full-time feature writer and sports columnist for Florida’s The Fort Lauderdale News and Sun Sentinel before moving to Detroit where he rose to national prominence as a sports journalist in the Detroit Free Press.

Now you can say that Albom should have rested his laurels after a successful career in journalism. But another accidental chapter in his life would then propel him to another level. He did not premeditate his fame in book authorship. In 1995, he married the love of his life, Janine. And it was also in the same year that he would frequent Morrie's house every Tuesday to listen and write about his life. It then became a New York Times bestseller for four years and is now deemed “the most successful memoir ever published” (mitchalbom.com). The rest of his book-writing career started off from that, emptying every bookstore with his other well-beloved works such as The Five People You Meet in Heaven, For One More Day, Have a Little Faith, The Time Keeper, The First Phone Call from Heaven, and The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto, among others.

Over the years and 40 million copies of books later, Albom’s body of work proves that his writing can supersede stereotypes and preconceptions. Once, some publishers rejected him and quipped he was just a sportswriter; now he is a sought-after author, speaker, and talk show host. More importantly, his philanthropic efforts are where he carves his message onto the hearts of his fellow Detroiters in The Heart of Detroit, people experiencing homelessness in A Hole in the Roof Foundation, and the orphans in Have Faith Haiti, which are just among his nine founded charities.

His writing advice? “Go out and surround yourself with the best music…the best art…and everything else will take care of itself. If you surround yourself with influences that you can absorb (it doesn't have to be writing)...you will find that you have creativity stirred inside of you” (UCTVInsight).

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