Martin Torgoff

Quick Facts

Full Name	Martin Torgoff
Occupation	American Journalist
Date Of Birth	Jan 29, 1952(1952-01-29)
Age	72
Country	United States
Birth City	New York
Horoscope	Capricorn

Martin Torgoff Biography

Martin Torgoff is one of the most popular and richest American journalist who was born on January 29, 1952 in New York, United States. Martin Torgoff (born November 29 1952) is an American journalist author, documentary filmmaker and producer, writer, and director of television. He has been active in the field of popular music as well as American pop culture. His most well-known work is his work “Can’t Find My Way Home: America In the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000” (2004) an account of the cultural history of illicit drugs and also for “The Drug Years”, the show for VH1 as well as Sundance that Torgoff created and starred in the show, which was an adaptation of his book. Through his career of forty years his work has covered the fields of art, music, film theatre, literature and biography, politics as well as race, history and sexuality, sociology, and popular culture.

Torgoff quit publication and wrote an in-depth report on the demise and demise of Elvis Presley named Elvis The Love of Your Sweet (1980). Torgoff was then the editor of an anthology and a complete guide to Presley’s life and workcalled The Complete Elvis (1981). The year 1986 was the time he released American Fool: The Roots and the Improbable rise of John “Cougar” Mellencamp. an extensive portrait of the musician that chronicles his journey starting in Seymour, Indiana, through the world of music. The book was honored with an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for the highest quality in the field of music journalism.

In 1992, Torgoff began a major work of non-fiction about how the use of illicit drugs shaped the entire cultural landscape of America during the post war era. The book published as Can’t Find My Way Home in 2004 took twelve years and involved hundreds of interviews, journeying from the arrival of heroin to the streets of Harlem in 1947 to the Ecstasy/Rave culture of the new millennium. Duane Davis of the Rocky Mountain News compared the book to Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool Aid Acid Test and Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night. The New York Times called it “An exuberant chronicle of ecstatic inebriation, delusional utopianism, wretched excess and chastened nostalgia for lost highs.”

After his last book, Torgoff wrote three multi-part series that were co- productions of VH-1 and Sundance, also serving as Consulting Producer on each: The Drug Years (2006) which was based on his book, Sex: The Revolution (2008), a cultural history of the sexual revolution in America; and Lords of the Revolution. As Torgoff appeared in The Drug Years and Sex as a principal commentator and narrator, he became a recognized TV personality and expert on the pop cultural landscape of the baby boom era. Torgoff then formed Prodigious Media with Richard Lowe. Their first project was the feature-length documentary for VH-1, Planet Rock: The Story of Hip Hop and the Crack Generation (2012), which Torgoff co-wrote, produced and directed with Lowe. Narrated by Ice-T, Planet Rock was about the ascent of hip hop during the controversial crack era of 1986-1992, as told from the point of view of four individuals who at one time were all teenaged crack dealers in inner city neighborhoods—Snoop Dog and B-Real in Los Angeles, and RZA and Raekwon of Wu- Tang Clan in New York—who all escaped the violence and madness of the crack trade to become seminal hip hop artists. The film also fully explores the political, sociological, and racial dimensions of the story. Rolling Stone described the film as “impossibly thorough…visceral and severe, going far beyond the places where drugs and music collide… a fantastic counterpoint to the sensationalistic media coverage that ran rampant under Nancy Reagan.”

Torgoff’s debut book on Elvis attracted the interest of the artist Andy Warhol and the editors of his magazine, Interview, where Torgoff became a Contributing Editor . The magazine covered numerous issues between 1980 until Warhol’s death in 1987.

Martin Torgoff Net Worth

Martin Torgoff is one of the richest American Journalist from United States. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, Martin Torgoff 's net worth $5 Million. (Last Update: December 11, 2023)

Torgoff was born in New York City and grew up in Glen Cove, on Long Island. He is the father of Bess Kagan and Irving Torgoff, a two time All American basketball player at LIU who was later an important athlete within the NBA as the first “sixth man” in pro basketball history. He was a player in the Red Auerbach’s Washington Capitols. Torgoff was an active kid before getting caught into the turmoil in the latter half of the 1960s when he was a teenager. He became one of the main leaders of the student protest in his school following attacks in the campus of Kent State in May 1970. He was a student at SUNY Cortland and the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, getting BAs in History as well as French.

In 1976 at the age 22 years old, Torgoff was hired as the Associate Editor for Grosset & Dunlap Publishers in New York, which brought Torgoff into the world of literature. He specialized in big illustrated books that showed his varied interests, such as The Woody Guthrie Songbook and The Things I Love by Liberace which were the first examples of what would later become an entire trend that would become a whole trend of “scrapbooks” in trade publishing.

In 1987, Torgoff wrote “Elvis ’56,” an hour-long film about that single meteoric year in Presley’s life. Produced by the Academy Award-winning documentarians Alan and Susan Raymond and narrated by Levon Helm, the film was nominated as Best Documentary at the USA Film Festival and acclaimed by Rolling Stone as not only the best film ever made about Elvis, but also one of the best ever produced on a rock and roll figure—“never has it been presented with such drama and with such an awareness of the political and social character of the time…by focusing on Elvis’s early promise, Elvis ’56 manages to capture much of the pure shock of rock and roll when it was new.”

Height, Weight & Body Measurements

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Who is Martin Torgoff Dating?

According to our records, Martin Torgoff is possibily single & has not been previously engaged. As of December 1, 2023, Martin Torgoff’s is not dating anyone.

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Facts & Trivia

Martin Ranked on the list of most popular American journalist. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in United States. Martin Torgoff celebrates birthday on January 29 of every year.