Edwin Lefevre
Born: January 23, 1871, Colón, Panama Died: February 22, 1943, Dorset, Vermont
American journalist, author, and diplomat who ghostwrote reminiscences-of-a-stock-operator based on extended interviews with Jesse-Livermore. Paul Tudor Jones credited Lefevre as the decisive ingredient: "An untrained writer, even with all the skills and personality Jesse Livermore brought to bear as a subject, could never have written such a classic piece of prose."
Reminiscences was first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in 1922, then published as a book in 1923. Lefevre wrote it in first person through the fictional narrator "Larry Livingston," maintaining just enough distance for Livermore to speak freely while preserving plausible deniability about real names and events. The book uses pseudonyms throughout — Jon Markman's 2010 annotated edition identifies the real persons behind most of them.
Career Arc
Born: January 23, 1870, Colón, Panama. Father Henry Lefevre was a Civil War veteran working in Panama as American agent for the Pacific Mail Steamship Co. Mother was the daughter of a former chief justice of the Panama Supreme Court.
Age 10: Father sent him on a solitary voyage to China to recover from typhoid fever. He found the Chinese dress styles confusing but was enchanted by the land. Returned to Panama and learned deep-sea diving from pearl fishers.
1887–1890: Attended Lehigh University, studying geology at first, then transferred to San Francisco public schools before Lehigh. Eventually attended.
Career: Became a reporter for the New York Sun. Later served as assistant financial editor at the New York Commercial Advertiser and the New York Commercial.
Novels: Also a successful novelist — Samson Rock of Wall Street (1907), The Golden Flood, and Wall Street Stories. The New York Times profiled Lefevre after Samson Rock: "There are two big motive powers in men, 'love and greed.' I made Wall Street the background to my story because it is the meeting place of the 'greed stricken.'"
1909: The government of Panama appointed him ambassador to Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Upon his return to the United States, he resumed writing about Wall Street, gathering the contacts and anecdotes that would later figure in Reminiscences.
Died: February 22, 1943, Dorset, Vermont. Left a widow and two sons. One son, Reid, became well known throughout the eastern seaboard as owner of the King Reid Show (a large traveling carnival) and as a long-serving Vermont legislator with a gift for conversation who became a confidant of Saturday Evening Post artist Norman Rockwell.
On Journalism as the Highest Trader Training
Paul-Tudor-Jones believed Lefevre's journalistic background was the decisive factor behind the book's enduring quality: "Newspaper journalism teaches you how to fact find, analyze, and condense a story down to its most essential points and then to communicate those in a series of paragraphs that read from the most important to the least important... Knowing this, a writer immediately focuses on those essential points that need to be communicated in any story and how to deliver those points in a way that answers the who, what, where, when, how, and why in short order. Learning to report and communicate in this fashion is far and away the best training any businessman, investor, or trader can have."
Jones rated journalism above the economics and business courses he took at the University of Virginia.
Related
- Jesse-Livermore
- Paul-Tudor-Jones
Sources
- reminiscences-of-a-stock-operator — ghostwriter/author; full biography in annotation 24.5