Rupert Scofield

Born in New York, 1949, to a downwardly mobile blue blood couple from Boston and Dayton, Ohio, Rupert Scofield grew up on the mean streets of Levittown, Long Island, where he was taunted and bullied mercilessly all through high school because his father made him wear wing tips and cuffs during the era of Cuban heels and clam diggers. His father flew 90 missions in a B-25 over France and Italy, got the girl but then led a life of quiet desperation, climbing no higher than Assistant Treasurer of a New York bank. Resolved to never work for “the man”, and especially never have a career in banking, Scofield today is President & CEO of a global financial services empire spanning 21 countries of Latin America, Africa, Eurasia and the Middle East, serving millions of the world’s poorest, half of whom are women, with microfinance. Scofield’s writing career began at the age of ten with a short story, The Last Request, published in the Camp Chewonki Chronicle in 1959. The story dealt with a boy who spends summer break with his vampire uncle in Bulgaria (he knew the living dead came from Eastern Europe, just got the country wrong). After a 29-year hiatus, Scofield next broke into print with a Spanish translation of "The Sheraton Murders" (Hermanos de Sangre, Editorial Molino de Viento, 2008), based on the Death Squad murders of two American labor organizers and a Salvadoran peasant farmer union leader in the dining room of the Sheraton Hotel in El Salvador in 1980. The translator, a Salvadoran poet and journalist, said “As I was undertaking the translation, I couldn’t get the characters out of my head. Rupert understands the Salvadoran people almost better than we do ourselves.” Scofield's next book, "The Social Entrepreneur's Handbook: How to Start, Build and Run a Business that Improves the World", published by McGraw-Hill in 2011, is intended to inspire the next generation of social entrepreneurs. This was followed by "Default to Bold: Anatomy of a Turnaround", which tells the true story of his organization's miraculous survival and recovery from a global financial crisis, and his investors' best efforts to destroy both the author and his company. Scofield's most recent work, "Ronnie's Greenhouse", recounts the trials of a romantic quadrangle comprised of a clone of a former President (40), an under-loved biotechnologist, a neophyte woman campaign manager and a beauty queen who hit the campaign trail in 2048 to save America. A former All-American lacrosse player, father of three and Professorial Lecturer at Georgetown University, Scofield has spent the better part of his life dodging revolutions, earthquakes and assassins in the Third World, and once ran for his life from a mob in Mogadishu, Somalia.