Biographical Note

I was born in 1931 in Huntington, New York, grew up there, graduated from Princeton, served in the U.S. Navy, graduated from Columbia Law School, and worked as a lawyer before becoming a full-time writer. I conceived of the idea and wrote the prototype and first book for Bantam’s classic Choose Your Own Adventure series, wrote a lot of other books in the series, and created other series and works of fiction and non-fiction, including Imagining the Universe (1994), which received a Scientific American book award. In 2016, I self-published It’s a Miracle It Wasn’t Worse, a memoir of growing up on Long Island in the 1930s and 1940s. Since December, 2016, I’ve been posting a daily blog on this website. I expect to continue it for the foreseeable future. Also accessible on this website is my essay “The View from Ninety-Two,” (a slightly revised version of its predecessor, “The View from Ninety”), which I was inspired to write by realizing how radically my view of life, and of myself, had changed from what it had been until my late eighties. My new book, Imagine: Fifty-Nine Thought Experiments that Tell You What You Think, is also accessible on this website.