Michael Castleman’s latest book, The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing, is a passion project he researched for 44 years and wrote, on and off, for 18 years.
Beyond being a historian of publishing, Michael Castleman is the world’s most popular sexuality writer:
• His twice-monthly blog, “All About Sex,” on PsychologyToday.com, launched in 2009, has amassed more than 58 million views.
• His free Question & Answer site, GreatSexGuidance.com, introduced in 2010, has attracted 2 million more.
• His latest sexuality book, Sizzling Sex for Life (2021), is “the most practical, authoritative, and comprehensive sexuality guide ever written”—Eli Coleman, Ph.D., chair of the University of Minnesota Sexuality Program.
• His two previous sexuality guides—Sexual Solutions (1980, 1989) and Great Sex (2004)—have combined sales of 600,000 copies.
• He also writes weekly Substack columns focused on sex research as well as another on publishing.
• And he’s answered more than 12,000 sex questions through GreatSexGuidance, and for WebMD, Playboy, and many other websites, magazines, speaking engagements, and call-in radio programs.
Castleman graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Michigan in 1972. In 1978, he earned a Masters in Journalism from UC Berkeley.
He has written more than 3,000 health and sexuality articles for newspapers, magazines, and websites, including the New York Times, AARP magazine, Readers Digest, Smithsonian, Salon.com, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Family Circle, Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Men’s Journal, Mother Jones, and The Nation, among many others. Library Journal has called him “one of the nation’s top health writers.”
Castleman’s 19 books have sold more than 2.5 million copies. His top seller is The New Healing Herbs, a folklore-meets-science guide to the 130 most widely used herbal medicines. It has sold more than 1.2 million copies.
His three-novel mystery series features a journalist sleuth and San Francisco history.
Castleman grew up in a Long Island suburb of New York City. Since 1975, he has lived in San Francisco.