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RICH ELLIOTT was an All-American track athlete in high school and a Big 8 Champion distance runner at Kansas University. He pursued a career as a high school English teacher and track coach, and later he became an editor and producer in educational publishing, working on textbooks, video series, and technology products.
Elliott’s early writing was in sports nonfiction. He is the author of the best-selling The Competitive Edge: Mental Preparation for Distance Running (1984, 1991, 2008) and the award-winning anthology Runners on Running: The Best Nonfiction of Distance Running (2010).
Elliott’s first collection of fiction, Duck and Cover: Eleven Short Stories, came out in 2018. The stories are based on his growing up in the Midwest in the 1960s. His second collection of fiction, What Mad Pursuit: Short Stories about Runners, was published in 2021. The stories spring from his years of experience as a runner and a coach. Both of these fiction collections were chosen as Kirkus Review’s Best Books of the Year.
Elliott and his wife live in Valparaiso, Indiana.
Reviewed by Jon Michael Miller for Readers' Favorite
The Secret History of Famous People: Ten Short Stories by Rich Elliot is a collection of previously published tales, all ten crisply written and fabulously inventive. Each one looks at a celebrity, whether a writer, a politician, a conqueror, or a sports star (among others). Elliot dips into the vagueness of official records and creates an emotional or hilarious tale of what might have escaped the published biographies. He begins with Shakespeare’s boyhood in Stratford-upon-Avon. The restless son of a glove-maker, the boy is awestruck by a traveling band of actors and ends up writing the “Band of Brothers” speech in Henry V, and joins the actors to become the most famous playwright in history. And on Elliot goes, writing previously unknown tidbits from the lives of Emily Dickinson, Lord Byron’s mathematician daughter (the inventor of the computer?), Muhammad Ali’s interest in magic, and so on.
I cannot remember when I’ve enjoyed a book this much. Rich Elliot’s imagination, combined with his direct, fast-moving writing skills, absorbed my interest to the neglect of my daily duties. Although I was immersed in each one, my favorite is the one he saved for last: The Great American Wannabe Experience, in which a TV program was able to place a regular person into the life of a celebrity. The Walter Mitty-like narrator is transported into the lives of Wilt Chamberlain (rumored to have slept with over 20,000 women), Teddy Roosevelt (charging up San Juan Hill), and a wild, drunken Ernest Hemingway bash. I laughed and marveled all through this superb and brilliant anthology, and will never view history in quite the same way, looking through the various feats to the real person who may have been beneath. Next time you’re looking for a fabulous read, pick up Rich Elliot’s The Secret History of Famous People. You won’t be able to put it down.
