Harry Lorayne is an American magician and a memory-training specialist and writer who was called "The Yoda of Memory Training" and "The World's Foremost Memory-Training Specialist" by Time magazine. He is well known for his incredible memory demonstrations and has appeared on numerous television shows including 24 times on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. His book The Memory Book was a New York Times bestseller. His card magic, especially his innovations in card sleights, is widely emulated by amateur and professional magicians.
Life and career
Lorayne grew up in New York's Lower East Side and he learned sleight of hand at the Hamilton Fish Park in the 1930s. At age 18, he began to perform as a table magician at Billy Reed's Little Club at 70 E. 55th St. in New York. The actor Victor Jory, noted for his role as a magician detective, was a regular visitor to the club. Lorayne started performing memory tricks for Jory and Jory's enthusiastic response changed Lorayne's approach to performing. Lorayne saw his first card trick when he was 11 years old and immediately knew he had to figure out how to do it himself. He stole empty milk bottles from in front of apartments in the tenement in which he lived so that he could collect the $.02 deposit on them and be able to afford a deck of cards. He worked at it and figured out multiple ways to perform the trick, including better ways than the magician he had first seen perform it. Lorayne began appearing on national television in 1958, first on I've Got a Secret, where he demonstrated his ability to remember everybody's name in the audience and later appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and numerous other television shows including Jack Paar, The Merv Griffin Show, The Mike Douglas Show, The Regis Philbin Show, Good Morning America, The Today Show, That's Incredible, David Susskind. He was a regular performer on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. To demonstrate his memory, Lorayne would stand beside the president of the club he was visiting and be introduced to each member. The number of members of a club could reach up to 1,500. After an hour and a half, Lorayne would speak about memory for about 20 minutes and then ask if anyone had a question. He promised that he would pay any questioner whose name he could not remember a thousand dollars. He always remembered the names of every member of the audience. Lorayne also made news by memorizing and recalling information from phone books with no errors. On just about every public appearance demonstrating his memory abilities, he would meet all the people in the audience as they arrived, and then would open his show by asking all the people he met to please stand. He would ask them to sit down when he pointed to them and correctly said their name, and would usually make the entire audience sit down. He had a memory school in New York employing such instructors as Bob Elliott and Darwin Ortiz. His Memory Power video course was used as part of the training of many top corporations. He has continued to give lectures and actively write books beyond the age of 90.
Writer and publisher
Harry Lorayne is a prolific author of memory training books intended for the public, as well as writing books for professional magicians. His The Memory Book has sold over two million copies, whilst in , Bob Dylan writes that he read Lorayne's book shortly before breaking through as a music star after finding it in the book collection of a friend. "Harry Lorayne is the most influential author, publisher, and teacher of magic routines in the world today," according to Randy Wakeman. For twenty years, Lorayne wrote and published the monthly magazine Apocalypse, which was created and started with Richard J. Kaufman, who left after the first year.
