Robert Greene

Robert Greene (born in Los Angeles in 1959) is an American writer best known for practical books about strategy, power and seduction. Since the late 1990s his work has become a publishing phenomenon that draws both devoted readers and fierce criticism, which makes it worth understanding. It shows how history, politics and military thought are now read by a general audience outside the university.

He grew up in Los Angeles, attended the University of California, Berkeley, and finished his degree in classical studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. By his own estimate he held around fifty jobs before he became an author, among them construction worker, translator, magazine editor and Hollywood screenwriter. In 1995, while working at Fabrica, an art and media school in Italy, he met the book packager Joost Elffers and pitched him a book about power. That proposal grew into The 48 Laws of Power, which Greene regards as the turning point of his life.

Greene treats history as a storehouse of cases. Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz and Napoleon sit alongside businesspeople, entertainers and inventors. His central claim is that power is amoral, neither good nor evil, and that premise explains why some readers take his books as survival guides for professional life while others see manuals for manipulation. He later wrote Mastery and, with the rapper 50 Cent, The 50th Law.

His legacy is twofold. Musicians in hip hop have quoted his work, and it has been discussed in business and political circles. At the same time, his books are among the most requested titles in American prison libraries, and many prisons also restrict them for security reasons. Greene continues to write and speak, and his influence is measured as much by how readers apply his ideas as by the arguments they continue to provoke.