Neil Strauss

Before he became known to a wide reading public as “Style,” Neil Darrow Strauss learned the trade the slow way: by writing, editing, checking facts, and paying close attention. Born in Chicago on March 9, 1969, Strauss graduated from the Latin School of Chicago in 1987, attended Vassar College, and then transferred to Columbia University, where he graduated in psychology in 1991. While still in school, he began writing for the avant-garde magazine Ear and edited Radiotext(e), an anthology of radio-related writings for Semiotext(e). At The Village Voice, he worked his way through copyediting, fact-checking, and writing copy before becoming a reporter and critic.

That apprenticeship helped shape the journalist he became: curious, observant, and comfortable moving between subcultures and celebrity circles. Invited by Jon Pareles to become a music critic at The New York Times, Strauss wrote the Pop Life column and front-page stories on topics including Wal-Mart’s CD-editing policies, music censorship, radio payola, and the lost wax figures of country music stars. Jann Wenner later invited him to become a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where Strauss wrote cover stories on figures such as Kurt Cobain, Madonna, Tom Cruise, Orlando Bloom, the Wu-Tang Clan, Gwen Stefani, Stephen Colbert, and Marilyn Manson.

Strauss’s work brought him recognition beyond bylines. He won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for his coverage of Kurt Cobain’s death for Rolling Stone and for his profile of Eric Clapton in The New York Times Arts & Leisure section. He also contributed to magazines including Esquire, Maxim, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Details, and The Source, and wrote liner notes for albums by Nirvana and others. His pop-culture life even crossed into performance, with appearances in Beck’s “Sexx Laws” video, Thirty Seconds to Mars’ “Up in the Air” video, and an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The book that made Strauss most widely discussed was The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, published in 2005. After leaving The New York Times to ghostwrite Jenna Jameson’s memoirs, he entered the seduction community, created the persona “Style” in 2001, and later wrote about the experience for The New York Times. The Game described his transformation under the tutelage of Mystery and documented his encounters with pickup artists including Steve P, Rasputin, Ross Jeffries, and others. It appeared on The New York Times bestseller list and reached the top position on Amazon.com after its U.S. release.

In the years that followed, Strauss kept turning personal immersion into narrative. He published Rules of the Game in 2007, founded the dating coaching company Stylelife Academy that same year, and later spoke critically about parts of the pickup community, describing some within it as people with “hateful and distorted views of reality.” His 2009 book Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life came after three years spent among survivalists, tax-dodgers, billionaire businessmen, and the government itself, and entered The New York Times bestseller list at No. 3. In 2011, Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead collected 228 celebrity vignettes from his years as a pop-culture journalist.

Strauss’s private life also became part of his writing. He married model Ingrid De La O on August 31, 2013, after holding a funeral-themed bachelor’s party to lay to rest his “Style” persona. Their first child was born in March 2015, and later that year he released The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships, a sequel to The Game about his struggles to build and maintain a relationship after years in the seduction world. Strauss and Ingrid De La O divorced in October 2018. His words still resonate because they often come from lived contradiction: performance and honesty, appetite and consequence, reinvention and responsibility. As he put it, “Without commitment, you cannot have depth in anything.”