The Stranger in the Lifeboat

Mitch Albom began his career in the field of journalism. Having graduated from Brandeis and Columbia University, he became a successful sports journalist for the better part of the 1980s and 1990s. His first mainstream bestseller was Tuesdays with Morrie, which chronicled the time he spent with a former professor during the last days of a terminal illness. With the overwhelmingly positive reception of this first book, Albom would shift gears in respect to his writing career and continue to publish work in a similar genre.

Albom’s work drifts back and forth between nonfiction and fiction novels, but they all—to some extent—explore questions of faith, hope, mortality, and the meaning of life. In this way, Tuesdays with Morrie serves as a kind of template and archetype for the rest of his novels, signaling the kind of writing in which he would continue to engage. Some of Albom’s works not only deal with larger questions in general or in the abstract but also create a specific setting in which communication with the life to come is made explicit and literal. The follow-up to his debut was entitled The Five People You Meet in Heaven, his first fictional work, which chronicles the experience of a man who dies and meets five people in heaven with whom he was strangely bound on earth.