について
Born May 14, 1959 in Los Angeles, Greene studied classics at UC Berkeley and took a degree in classical studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Before publishing his first book at the age of forty, he worked an unusual range of jobs — translator, magazine editor, Hollywood story developer — that he has since said gave him the cross-domain breadth his writing depends on. The early career feeds the books: his cases come from antiquity, the Renaissance, military history, and contemporary biography in roughly equal measure.
His method is to identify a structural pattern of human behavior — the laws of power, the strategies of war, the dynamics of seduction, the path to mastery — and ground each principle in densely worked historical case studies, generally several per principle and frequently from periods most contemporary readers wouldn’t otherwise encounter. The reading experience is episodic and aphoristic rather than linear; the books are built to be returned to in fragments and reread on different occasions for different problems.
His first book made him a cultural figure across unexpectedly varied audiences: rappers and prison populations adopted it for its strategic frankness, founders and operators adopted it for the same reason, and it remains formally banned in many US prison systems. Greene suffered a serious stroke in 2018 and has spoken openly about a long recovery; the work has continued through it. His books have sold more than 5 million copies and have been translated into more than thirty languages.