Harry Lorayne

Harry Lorayne was born Harry Ratzer in New York City in 1926 and grew up poor on the Lower East Side. He had undiagnosed dyslexia and left school after one year of high school. As a young man he worked as a close-up magician in New York clubs, where he began to add memory feats to his act.

His first book, How to Develop a Super-Power Memory (1957), teaches the Link system for lists, a phonetic Peg system for numbers and substitute words for names and faces. His signature act was to meet an audience before a show and then call everyone by name. He showed the methods on television from 1958, including 24 appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He wrote many more memory books, the best known being The Memory Book (1974) with basketball player Jerry Lucas.

Among magicians he was just as well known for card magic books and for Apocalypse, a monthly magic magazine he wrote and published for twenty years. Research supports his core techniques for lists and vocabulary, though some of his claims about memory are overstated. He died in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 2023, aged 96.