BEN STEIN
Renaissance Man

Ben Stein was born November 25, 1944, in Washington, DC. The son of the economist and writer Herbert Stein, he grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and attended Montgomery Blair High School. He graduated from Columbia University in 1966 with honors in economics. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1970 as valedictorian of his class by election of his classmates. Stein helped to found the Journal of Law and Social Policy while at Yale. He has worked as a poverty lawyer in New Haven, Connecticut and Washington, DC, a trial lawyer in the field of trade regulation at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, DC, and as a university adjunct at American University in Washington, DC, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. At American University he taught about the political and social content of mass culture. He taught the same subject at UCSC, as well as about political and civil rights under the US Constitution. At Pepperdine, he taught about libel law and about securities law and ethical issues since 1986.

In 1973 and 1974, he was a speechwriter and lawyer for Richard Nixon at the White House, and then worked for Gerald Ford. (He did not write the link, “I am not a crook.”) He has been a columnist and editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, a syndicated columnist for the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner, King Features Syndicate, and a frequent contributor to Barron’s, where his articles about the ethics of management buyouts and issues of fraud in the Milken Drexel junk bond scheme drew national attention. He has been a regular columnist for Los Angeles Magazine, New York Magazine, E! Online, and most of all, has written a lengthy diary for the American Spectator. He also writes frequently for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and almost every other imaginable magazine.

He has written and published several books, including novels largely about life in Los Angeles, and nonfiction books about finance and ethical and social issues in finance, and also about the political and social content of mass culture. He has done pioneering work in uncovering the concealed messages of TV and in explaining how TV and movies get made. His titles include: A License to Steal: The Untold Story of Michael Milken and the Conspiracy to Bilk the Nation; The View from Sunset Boulevard; Financial Passages; and Ludes. His most recent books include the best-selling humor self-help book, How to Ruin Your Life; How Successful People Win: Using Bunkhouse Logic to Get What You Want in Life; and 26 Steps to Succeed in Hollywood…or Any Other Business, co-authored with Al Burton. He has also been a longtime screenwriter, writing, among many other scripts (most of which were unmade), the first draft of The Boost, a movie based on Ludes; the outlines of the lengthy miniseries, Amerika; and the acclaimed Murder in Mississippi. He was one of the creators of the well-regarded comedy, Fernwood Tonight.

He is also a well-known actor, and has appeared in movies, on TV, and in commercials. His part as the boring teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was recently ranked as one of the 50 most famous scenes in American film. From 1997 to 2002, he was the host of the Comedy Central quiz show, Win Ben Stein’s Money. The show won seven Emmy Awards during its run. He now regularly discusses finance on the Fox News Channel.

He lives in Beverly Hills with his wife, his son, four cats, and two large dogs.