The definitive, landmark biography of Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist whose singular vision revolutionized American politics, by a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist

Bernie Sanders is the godfather of one the most potent contemporary mass movements in America. As a populist insurgency rises against the national elite, the man who birthed it more than any other remains both universally recognizable and confoundingly enigmatic.

Bernie appears to embody a series of paradoxes: An eighty-four-year-old curmudgeon beloved by millions of young people. A class-first socialist shaped by the cultural convulsions of the sixties. A great champion of the left, and often its most frustrating antagonist. A believer in the collective who insists on his independence, and the champion of political revolution who has worked inside the Capitol for three decades.

With unprecedented access to private records, insider sources, and the senator himself, award-winning journalist Jeff Stein untangles these contradictions to show the man behind the caricature. He reconstructs the surreal and singular journey from Brooklyn back alleys and Vermont communes to stadium-filled rallies and showdowns in the White House. He takes readers behind the scenes with the foremost figures in politics—Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump; the Clintons; Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—while delving deep into Bernie’s most crucial influences, from family heartbreak to the comrade against whom Bernie formed his identity.

Bernie reveals both the painful compromises and the stubborn idealism at the core of America’s most consequential socialist, showing in full the human whose resistance to oligarchy spawned a political supernova. Above all, it is the indelible story of an extraordinary American life.