Stevin Hoover

HOOVER BIO

Long before he made his name as a writer and speaker, he was putting in 90-100 hour weeks as a Boston money manager, waking up early before going into his office and squeezing in time on week-ends to work on his true interest—writing.

Born on October 10th, 1948, in Franklin, Pennsylvania, to a lineman and a secretary,

Stevin Hoover’s high school English teacher told him he had a gift with the English language. She encouraged him to write—about anything and everything.

This encouragement was further bolstered when he got to the U.S. Air Force Academy and his Humanities professor said don’t waste time on engineering courses when your gift is writing, speaking foreign languages, and philosophy.

So he shifted gears and headed for the University of Texas at Austin, known in the 1960s as the “Harvard of the South.” There he studied under some of the greatest philosophy, classics, and English professors in America, including John Silber. After graduating from UT, he headed to Germany, where he read the great German writers in the original. He became fluent in German and began trading commodities and stocks as a registered representative.

He returned to the States and eventually started his own investment firm. More than a decade later, he slipped up and got taken down by the SEC, who decided he had to go to the time out box. It was there in the time out box that he met Mark Whitacre, the man widely known in American business history as the highest-level whistleblower of all time. Whitacre saw Hoover’s talent, so he asked him to write Whitacre’s life story. That became Mark Whitacre Against All Odds. Much of it was written under secrecy while the two were in prison. Hoover used the pen name Floyd Perry. The two men remain close friends to this day. In 2009, actor Matt Damon received a Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of Whitacre in the Warner Bros./Soderbergh movie, The Informant!

Hoover currently divides his time between Florida and Mississippi. He is finishing his first Junior Novel (ages 10 to 14), which will be part of The Hannah Chronicles Series. Book One, THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR, is due out in April.

He is also working on a prison novel, DEN OF INFINITE SADNESS, a fictional account of a respected Wall Street trader who lands in prison. The sadness in even the most loosely regulated prison facilities is infinite and indescribable. In paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hoover recently said, “I believe the prison situation in the United States is hopeless, but, like Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA), who sponsored Senate Bill 714, I am determined to make it otherwise.”

When he’s not writing, Hoover devotes his time to land conservation and Bikram yoga. He also remains a devoted student of the market and posts Instablogs at Seeking Alpha under the name "ForMyOwnAccount."