Two floors beneath the reading room of the New York Public Library, a guard who has taken a liking to a regular visitor unlocks a row of oak boxes. Inside are manuscripts by Whitman, Dickens and Twain, and then the one the guard has saved for last: a quill, a razor to sharpen it, and a long scroll made of forty-odd strips of paper sealed end to end with wax, written to the margins by a poet who could not afford proper sheets. The visitor, a cinema usher earning thirty-four dollars a week, walks out with a two-volume biography of Edgar Allan Poe. The Steps by Sylvester Stallone keeps returning to scenes like this one, where a young man with nothing works out that great work can come from people who had nothing too.
A City That Taught Him for Free
The book is marketed on Rocky, and the Rocky chapters are its engine, but the New York half is where the memoir earns its keep. Stallone arrives in August 1969 and sleeps on a Port Authority bench until a police officer’s baton finds the soles of his boots. He takes a room at a derelict East Side hotel so narrow that he can sit on the bed, shut the door and nearly reach the window at once. He showers fully dressed to save on laundry.
What makes The Steps by Sylvester Stallone more than a catalogue of hardship is how purposeful the poverty becomes. As an usher at an East Side cinema, he refuses the smoke breaks the other staff take and studies the screen instead, taping the dialogue on a secondhand recorder and writing it out in notebooks after his shift, a nightly dissection of why one scene lands and another dies. He wanders the Museum of Modern Art until the ticket taker stops charging him. And on a Midtown corner he befriends a blind street poet in a horned helmet named Moondog, who turns out to be a serious composer, and whose example of doing things his own way hits the lonely young writer hard.
There are darker lessons. A trash hauler threatens him at the deli where he slices fish, he grabs a meat mallet and a knife, and he spends ten days in the Manhattan jail known as The Tombs. An early agent’s “audition” in Brooklyn turns out to be a trap. Stallone tells these with a street storyteller’s rhythm, and for most readers this part will be the surprise.
The Woman on the Telephone
If the father in The Steps by Sylvester Stallone is a fist, the mother is a voice. Her lines come back to her son across decades: that his birth ruined her chances of stardom, that he should apologise for being unplanned, that she tried more than once not to have him. Stallone gives her history fairly. She was abandoned to an orphanage by a stepmother at thirteen and pregnant by fifteen, and the book understands where the loathing came from without excusing it.
Her later life is told with a novelist’s appetite for the grotesque: the marriage to a retired jockey for his late wife’s acid-peel formula, a Las Vegas skin clinic, two women who died after treatment there, a licence lost. During the Rocky shoot she phones to suggest he take up hairdressing, and she declines a visit to the set because of a piano lesson. When the Oscar nominations come and he offers her a seat, she will only attend if her hairdresser comes too. The last of those calls, about a Christmas when he was eleven that she simply denies ever happened, is the most painful passage in The Steps by Sylvester Stallone.
The Talent Was Always Improvisation
The strongest argument The Steps by Sylvester Stallone makes about its author is that he was a better writer on his feet than at a desk. In The Lords of Flatbush a half-page scene in a jewellery store, with his character dodging the price of an engagement ring, grows through improvisation into several minutes of comic chaos that a Time critic singled out. A detail on the Rocky shoot, the cheap blue hat he buys from a junk shop beside the pet store location and fights to keep, is the same instinct in a prop: the conviction that a small, true thing will carry more than any line.
Where Sylvester Stallone Overplays His Hand
The reservations are serious enough to argue about. Stallone settles scores with relish. He mocks a boxer who walked away from the role of Apollo, describes one producer in personal and insulting terms, and recounts waiting hours outside Francis Ford Coppola’s office before smashing a cake labelled with the director’s name, followed by a second-hand claim about Coppola’s fury that he cannot have witnessed. It is funny, and it is petty, and he does not seem to notice the second part.
The structure of The Steps by Sylvester Stallone lurches, too. A long flashback to a teenage week in a school’s locked psychiatric ward, brutal and gothic and including an assault on him, is dropped between the Los Angeles low point and the writing of Rocky, where it breaks the momentum without quite justifying itself. Nearly every chapter ends on a motivational maxim, a habit that turns a vivid life into a seminar. Small numbers slip: one test screening’s audience is two different sizes within a paragraph. The reported language about psychiatric patients is passed on without reflection. Readers should also know the book carries physical and sexual violence, cruelty toward a child, imprisonment and a great deal of profanity, all told plainly.
Sylvester Stallone Before the Franchise
His first full memoir, out now from William Morrow since 29 September 2026, is careful to end before the legend takes over. Readers of The Steps by Sylvester Stallone who know only the later action films may be startled by how much writing filled the early years: plays, a long screenplay about Poe written under a pen name, and a script about three brothers in Hell’s Kitchen that he once optioned to two Texans for a hundred dollars. It became Paradise Alley, his first film as a director, in 1978.
His screen apprenticeship ran from The Lords of Flatbush to a gun-toting racer in Death Race 2000, and the habit of painting he picked up at a school for troubled teenagers has lasted a lifetime. At eighty he is still working, now as a mob boss in the television series Tulsa King.
What It Leaves Behind
The Steps by Sylvester Stallone is a better book than its sermons suggest and a smaller one than its subject could have supported. What survives is the education: the room, the notebooks, the library vault, the calls home that never got easier.
Readers drawn to the mother should go next to I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy, a far harder look at a parent who wanted fame through her child. The Third Gilmore Girl by Kelly Bishop offers a gentler working actor’s life from the same New York stages. And Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen pairs well for a working-class kid, a difficult father and the long climb to one breakthrough record.
The scroll in the vault ran to some twenty-five feet. Stallone filled about thirty notebooks with other people’s dialogue before anyone paid him for a page of his own.