Success Requires More Than Tenacity

There are lessons in what it takes to triumph over life's challenges.

Scene from Shakespeare's The Tempest by William Hogarth, 1735 (Wikipedia - public domain)

“Success comes to the lowly and to the poorly talented, but the special characteristic of a great person is to triumph over the disasters and panics of human life.” — Seneca

His father was a dress cutter who did not get much work after the Great Depression began. As a result, his family had to live in a one-bedroom apartment in New York, where they barely scraped by.

As a boy, he read voraciously in that small apartment. His parents, Jack and Celia were Romanian-born immigrants, and were happy to indulge this passion and even bought him a bookstand that he could keep on the table so that he could read during dinner. He particularly enjoyed Sherlock Holmes stories.

When he was able to go to the movies, he enjoyed the dashing and heroic Errol Flynn.

The young boy knew what a sacrifice all of that was for his parents, and inspired by those books and the movies he watched, he vowed to grow up to write the Great American Novel.

At 16, his Uncle Robbie helped him land his first job as an office assistant at a publishing house. There he’d fetch lunch, proofread, and refill artist’s ink jars… Not exactly a glamorous path toward becoming a writer, but it was a start, and it was close to the action.

But when he finally was given a job as a writer at that office, he did something strange: he refused to use his real name.

You see, he aspired to something greater. And he felt that he would sully his real name if he used it in connection with a job that was not as serious as he’d like.

But the boy — now a young man — was a natural storyteller. And his stories took off. At which point, he abandoned his dream of being a novelist and legally changed his name to his pen name — a name that would become recognized around the world: