Neil Strauss attended a private Chicago high school, the Latin School of Chicago. Strauss later attended Columbia University for two years, as well as Vassar College[1]. He began his career writing for Ear, an avant-garde magazine, before moving on to the Village Voice, where he did everything from copy-editing to fact-checking[2]. His fastidiousness paid off when he was invited by Jon Pareles[3] to become a music critic at The New York Times, where he wrote the influential Pop Life column. He was then invited by Jann Wenner to become a contributing editor at Rolling Stone where he wrote cover stories on Kurt Cobain, Madonna, Tom Cruise, Orlando Bloom, the Wu-Tang Clan, Gwen Stefani and Marilyn Manson. He won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for his coverage of Kurt Cobain's suicide for Rolling Stone and his profile of Eric Clapton in The New York Times Arts & Leisure section.