Ben Mezrich: Based on a True Story

During his college years at Harvard, and even for a long time after, Mezrich was a touch quiet and socially awkward. He had a haircut that his wife, Tonya, describes as a "Lego piece," a helmetlike 'do that looked like it could be removed all at once. He also had a "go-to" shirt—an off-white number with stripes and stitched designs that looked like crop circles—that popped up in pretty much every photo he was in for about five years. Mezrich is not a terribly big guy—really, very average and nondescript—and when he went out to a bar, he was perfectly happy to hide in the background. One night, he saw a beautiful girl across the bar, but he was too nervous to approach her. He sent a friend over instead. That's how Mezrich met Tonya.

"He was a total geek," D'Agostino says. "He had this huge TV with a PlayStation. He was really into sci-fi. He was really nice and quirky. He was writing about nanotech, and his room was like a fucking hurricane hit it. There were nanotechnology books everywhere."

Mezrich had done some writing for The X-Files after college, but mostly he was scribbling novels. The first few were never published. Mainly because they weren't good. "They were crap," Mezrich corrects. "I sent them out—reject, reject, reject. I got about 190 rejection slips. I still have them."

At the time, he was doing some of his writing under a pen name that wasn't much better than his prose: Holden Scott, a mash-up of the Catcher in the Rye protagonist and the Great Gatsby author. Luckily for Mezrich, while he was developing his career, his parents were willing to offer some support. His mother, Molli, had always thought her son would become an author, remembering how, when he was six or seven and growing up in Princeton, New Jersey, he would sit on the stoop outside a relative's house and occupy himself with a pencil and paper. "He's been a storyteller for a long time," she says.

His dad, Reuben, agreed to send money to cover the bills. But he wanted Mezrich to find solid work. Paying work. "I was worried that this guy would be living in a cardboard box," he says, recalling his son's unpublished works. "To be honest, his earlier books weren't so hot."

Still, Mezrich kept knocking them out, rushing water against the dam. Maybe as he did so, he got better. Maybe it was luck. Whatever the cause, he finally managed to get his first novel published in 1996. It was a thriller called Threshold that somehow wove together a mad scientist, the mapping of the human genome, and the unexpected death of the secretary of defense. Next would come the novel Reaper, which was turned into the TV movie Fatal Error, starring Antonio Sabato Jr. and Robert Wagner. "It still airs on the Sci Fi Channel," Mezrich says. "It's really a piece of shit."

Four more novels followed over the next two years. They sold well enough that his parents no longer had to prop him up, but not so well that anyone knew who he was. The night that he worked up the nerve to speak to Tonya, she asked what he did for a living. He said he was an author. She assumed he was lying.

Most writers would have been ecstatic to make a living pursuing their craft in anonymity, to have money in the bank—no job to report to, nothing more pressing than words traveling down the brain stem and out through the fingertips. But that wasn't what Mezrich was after. What was the point of being a writer if no one knew who you were? In some ways, Mezrich got into writing because it sounded fun and glamorous. "We had the usual discussion about how most writers struggle," says Reuben, who told his son that only one in 10,000 makes it. "But he would come back with all the authors who did very well."

Partly because it wasn't making him instantly famous, writing began to feel more and more like work. "You sit in your fucking room and you write and you write and you write," Mezrich says. "That's the worst part of the job. The best part is everything else." Frustrated by a career that wasn't panning out the way he'd dreamed, he considered trading the whole thing in for business school. Why toil away bent over a keyboard when you could make some real money?

Before Mezrich got around to sending off any school applications, though, he met Jeff Ma. At a party one night, while drinks flowed in another room, the two were introduced by a mutual friend. Ma cornered Mezrich and said that he had a great idea for a story. Mezrich was skeptical—it's a pitch every writer hears. Hey, buddy, I know what you should write about next. But then Ma told him about the MIT blackjack team. After that, Mezrich didn't think about business school anymore.