The Wolf of Wall Street Books in Order

The Wolf of Wall Street is a short nonfiction series built from Jordan Belfort's memoirs. Start with The Wolf of Wall Street and then move to Catching the Wolf of Wall Street. Together, the two books follow Belfort's rise as a stockbroker, the culture inside Stratton Oakmont, and the long, ugly crash that followed. These are not step by step finance books. They are personal, messy, high-speed accounts of salesmanship, fraud, excess, and fallout.

The main character is Belfort himself, telling the story from inside the machine he helped build. In the first book, he is a young salesman turning a gift for persuasion into money, status, and control. The setting matters a lot: New York finance, Long Island office culture, cold-call rooms, mansions, hotel suites, and yachts all feed the sense of speed and appetite that drives the memoir. It is a world where confidence counts for everything, and where sounding certain can matter more than being right.

The tone is loud, fast, funny in places, and often hard to believe.

What carries the first memoir is not suspense about where things are heading, because most readers already know the crash is coming. It is the scale of the appetite driving everything forward. Belfort writes about money, drugs, parties, and the boiler-room world with the same restless energy that powered the firm itself. At the same time, the books keep circling a darker truth: the victims were real, and the culture of endless selling came with a real human cost.

Catching the Wolf of Wall Street shifts the series into a different kind of story. The stakes are no longer just about landing the next deal or staying ahead of rivals. Now the focus is the FBI investigation, the collapse of Belfort's empire, the strain on his family life, the prison sentence, and the question of whether sobriety and some measure of self-respect are still possible. It still moves quickly, but the pressure becomes more personal and less performative.

In that sense, the series becomes a crash story after a rise story.

Readers usually come to these books for the outrageous Wall Street material, but the through-line is really about persuasion and what happens when it turns predatory. If you like memoirs about ambition, bad judgment, and public collapse, this series fits that lane. The first book was later adapted into Martin Scorsese's 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street, but the books give you the fuller reading experience, starting with the rise in The Wolf of Wall Street and finishing with the reckoning in Catching the Wolf of Wall Street.