WE KNEW HIS FACE WOULD tell us whether he liked the book idea or hated it, probably in the first fifteen seconds. So my agent, Jill Kneerim, and I decided to make our pitch in person to editor Will Murphy, without even hinting at the topic. We took the train from Boston to New York and marched over to Random House’s offices. “Will, I want to tell the story of the longest-lasting American hero of the last century,” I announced bluntly. “Who do you think it is?” A shadow of skepticism appeared, but Will played along. He made half a dozen guesses—politicians, sports stars, literary luminaries—all of them wrong. Then Jill carefully positioned on his desk a picture of Christopher Reeve’s Superman in the classic red-and-blue uniform.
A smile spread across Will’s face well before my fifteen seconds were up. Then he started asking the same exacting questions Jill had. What new could there possibly be to say about the planet’s best-known superhero? What credentials did I have to tell his story? Why did the world, which already had two hundred books about the comics and their leading man, need two hundred and one?
Their refusal to accept anything on faith is part of what I like about Jill and Will. The other part is their willingness to listen, then to get as fired up as I do. There are endless books on Superman, I explained, but most are sociological surveys or picture books, or deal exclusively with the comics, TV shows, or some other limited aspect of his expansive, multimedia career. None is a full-fledged account that approaches him as if he were human, which he is to tens of millions of fans who have followed his loves and deaths, reinventions, resurrections, and redemptions. The fact that he is ethereal lets us fill in our image of Superman from our own imaginations. Our longest-lasting champion, I said, offers a singular lens into our deep-rooted fears and our enduring hopes.
They were sold. Jill, who knows as little about Superman as she did about my last subject, Satchel Paige, helped me flesh out my ideas, pored over my manuscript, and held my hand. Will didn’t know much about baseball when he did a crackerjack job editing and advocating for Satchel, but he is crazy about comics and has helped make my story worthy of his passion.
The Superman idea came from the same place so many good things do for me, my wife, Lisa, and she was the first to go at my manuscript with a red pencil and sharp intellect. I enlisted two kinds of readers. First were the experts, and I had the best: Paul Levitz, the longtime boss and guiding light at DC Comics; Superman writer Mark Waid, who doesn’t just know more than anyone about the superhero but cares more; and Michael Hayde, whose own book demonstrates his nuanced understanding of Superman on the radio and TV. My other readers were old friends: Tom Maguire, whose blend of humor and serious-mindedness gives counterculturalism a good name, and Lou Ureneck, a seasoned newspaper editor and journalism professor who writes inspired memoirs. Even as she was finishing her own book, Sally Jacobs found the time to help me find the words I needed. Claudia Kalb did the same even as she was making a career change.
Two last words on readers: Evan Camfield. Production editors don’t come any better. He caught errors of fact and context, fine-tuned prose, and made what often is an exasperating process a pleasure. Two more Random House people to whom I am grateful: designer Chris Zucker, whose creative flair is here for you to see, and publicist David Moench, who is passionate about Superman and selling books.
Every city I visited and every issue I probed turned up questions and gaps. I filled them in with help from hundreds of authors, experts, and friends, all of whom I list in the bibliography and am grateful to. Those I went back to more than I had the right are Cary Bates, Rick Bowers, Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson Brown, Mike Carlin, Richard Donner, Jay Emmett, Danny Fingeroth, Gary Grossman, David Hyde, Jenette Kahn, Jack Larson, Brian McKernan, John Jackson Miller, Will Murray, Denny O’Neil, Jerry Ordway, Tom Pollock, Louise Simonson, Michael Uslan, and, last and most especially, John Wells.
I hired a stream of student researchers, in Boston, Cleveland, Washington, and Los Angeles, to help with library searches, courthouse and schoolhouse searches, and other inquiries. The ones who stayed the longest were Nick Catoni, Michael Goldsmith, Tim Lewis, Chris McElwain, Maryrose Mesa, Elliot Schwartz, and Josh Willis. The ever-deft Katie Donelan was my in-house, go- to person at Random House. I also had two in-home experts on comics and kids, Alec and Marina. Jim Cahill kept my computers running and me online. Thanks, finally, to my parents, Dot and Mauray, for letting Superman into your house and my heart, which was no small thing in the 1950s.
A couple of notes on style: I quote people I interviewed in the present tense, and use the past tense with those whose words came from earlier writings and recordings. My endnotes generally are abridged listings of sources, with the full references in the bibliography.