About the Author
Chris Crowley is best known today as the creator of and co-author of the N.Y. Times best seller, Younger Next Year with over two million copies sold in 23 languages … a cult book about behavior that has changed a great many lives. It was published when he was 70. Since then, he has published seven more books … two of them since turning 90.
The latest and his great favorite is, YOUNGER FOREVER, A SUPERAGER’S GUIDE TO LIFE AFTER FIFTY, published by Blackstone Publishing this fall when he was 92. It is off to a robust start. The basic premise of the book - and the great lesson of his own life - is that the Third Act (the years from 50 or 60 till the day you go over the waterfall) can be radically better than you had dared to hope.
More engaged, more active … more fun. His own Third Act, he reports, has been “the best in the whole damn play.” But the book also cautions that the Third Act can be much, much worse, than you feared – “the tar pit where the mastodons go to die.” It mostly depends, he says, on choices and actions, not genes and luck. The promise is that the Third Act can be joy. But only if you take it seriously.
In his Second Act, Chris was a lawyer for 25 years … a litigation partner at, a leading Wall Street law firm, Davis Polk. He led teams in major cases and investigations for some of the most powerful companies in America. He also brought a pro-bono case – which he successfully argued in the Supreme Court - to compel the City of New York to hire and promote more minority police officers. He loved the law and that firm, he says, but quit early (at 56) because he “wanted to live more than one life.”
The first step down that road was becoming a full-time ski bum in Aspen for five years with his wife, the portrait painter and sculptor Hilary Cooper. They both count those years as being among the best in their lives. They still go to Aspen every winter; in his 90s, he is still skiing the easier black diamond runs and loving it. Toward the end of the Aspen years, he began to develop the idea for Younger Next Year. He came back east to look for a scientific co-author and to become a full-time writer.
Chris was born in 1934 in Salem Massachusetts, 20 miles up the coast from Boston. He graduated from Exeter, Harvard College and The University of Virginia Law School, where he was Articles Editor of the Law Review. He has three children, six grandchildren and one great grandchild. He and Hilary live in New York City and Lakeville Connecticut with the great dog, Fergus.