Jordan Belfort Books in Order

If you want the full Wall Street memoir: The Wolf of Wall Street → Catching the Wolf of Wall Street
If you want Belfort's sales playbook: Way of the Wolf
If you want practical investing guidance: The Wolf of Investing
If you want all four books in order: The Wolf of Wall Street → Catching the Wolf of Wall Street → Way of the Wolf → The Wolf of Investing

Jordan Belfort was born on July 9, 1962, in Queens, New York, and grew up there. Long before he became a headline name, he was known for selling, talking fast, and pushing hard, traits that would shape every part of his career.

After graduating from American University, Belfort spent years on Wall Street. Before his biggest run in finance, he also tried other business ventures, including a meat and seafood company that failed. That mix of hustle, setback, and appetite for risk would become a pattern.

By 1989 he was running Stratton Oakmont, the brokerage firm that made him rich and later made him infamous. Belfort and his team built the business on hard selling and stock manipulation, and the money came fast. So did the excess, the drug use, and the chaos that later became central to his public image.

The legal reckoning took longer, but it came. The SEC moved against Stratton Oakmont in the early 1990s. Belfort pleaded guilty in 1999 to securities fraud and money laundering, and in 2003 he was sentenced to four years in prison, though he ultimately served 22 months.

Prison turned into the start of his writing life.

While incarcerated, he was encouraged by fellow inmate Tommy Chong to put his stories on the page. That push led to The Wolf of Wall Street, his memoir of the rise, excess, and collapse of his brokerage world. He followed it with Catching the Wolf of Wall Street, which moves into the raid, the criminal case, prison, sobriety, and the damage left behind.

Those two books are still the center of his writing career. Readers usually pick them up for the outrageous Wall Street stories, but the books also work because Belfort knows how to pace a scene, pile on detail, and keep a confession moving. The first memoir later became Martin Scorsese's 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Belfort.

He knows the value of a hook.

Later, Belfort moved from memoir into instruction. In Way of the Wolf he turns his Straight Line sales system into a direct guide to persuasion, tonality, certainty, and closing deals. In The Wolf of Investing he shifts toward personal finance, writing for readers who want clearer advice about building wealth, spotting bad behavior on Wall Street, and making more disciplined investment decisions.

Across his books, the same themes keep resurfacing: ambition, image, money, reinvention, and the way language can move people, for good or bad. His settings change from brokerage floors and Long Island offices to courtrooms, prison, and seminar stages, but the tension stays much the same, hustle on one side, ethics on the other. Publisher biographies say he now lives in Los Angeles with his two children. Alongside the books, he has built a second career in sales training and speaking, which makes his bibliography feel unusually consistent: whether he is telling war stories, explaining a pitch, or giving investing advice, he is still writing about persuasion and what it can cost.