Jerome Joseph Tuccille was born in the Bronx, New York on May 30, 1937. He received a degree in psychology from Manhattan College in 1959 and then entered the Marine Corps. In 1974, he ran for the governor of New York under the Free Libertarian Party. After his failed campaign left him broke, he became a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch and later for Shearson/American Express and other companies. In the 1990s, he became a financial writer for T. Rowe Price. His financial books included Everything the Beginner Needs to Know to Invest Shrewdly: A Step-By-Step Guide to the Basics of Financial Growth and The Optimist's Guide to Making Money in the 1980s: A Complete Program for Investing in the American Economic Miracle of the Next Decade. He wrote a series of biographies including Trump: The Saga of America's Most Powerful Real Estate Baron, Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller: The Life and Times of a Media Mogul, and Alan Shrugged: Alan Greenspan, the World's Most Powerful Banker. He also wrote books on his encounters with libertarianism and his intellectual development including Radical Libertarianism: A Right Wing Alternative, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, It Still Begins with Ayn Rand: Part Two of a Libertarian Odyssey, and Heretic: Confessions of an Ex-Catholic Rebel. One of his last book, The Roughest Riders: The Untold Story of the Black Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, was published in 2015. He died from complications of multiple myeloma on February 16, 2017 at the age of 79.