About the Author

Michael Largo was born in Staten Island, New York into a family of firefighters and police officers; his grandfather and father were part of the NYPD. He traced his maternal roots to the first Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam.

A devout altar boy in his youth, Largo was the borough's youngest Eagle Scout. He earned an A.S. in Environmental Science from The College of Staten Island and a B.A. in English from Brooklyn College, where he studied under the legendary poet John Ashbery and won the Whiteside Poetry Award.

Largo worked as editor of New York Poetry and numerous literary magazines, and served as a researcher/archivist for Allied Artists film company. In the early 1980s, he became the owner and founder of the famous St. Marks Bar & Grill in NYC's East Village, which attracted notable patrons including Allen Ginsberg, Joni Mitchell, Larry Rivers, and Keith Richards. The bar appeared in the Rolling Stones video for 'Waiting on a Friend.'

A unique achievement: Largo claims to have read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica while working on sea-going tugs (admitting to only getting to the letter U).

In the early 1990s, due to various incidents and close-calls with mortality, Largo became fixated on listing and examining the exact causes of death in America. He traveled widely collecting statistics, obituaries, and documents from colonial times to the present, research that led to his breakthrough work Final Exits.