Sly’s memoir, The Steps, is published on 29 September by William Morrow. Order your copy and watch his new sit-down interview with The New York Times.

Fifty years after Rocky Balboa ran up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Sylvester Stallone tells the story behind them. The Steps: A Memoir is published on Tuesday 29 September by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins.

The book covers the years between Sly’s arrival in New York in 1969 and Rocky’s Best Picture win at the 1977 Academy Awards. It is the account of a struggling actor who slept on pizza boxes, cleaned the lion cages at Central Park Zoo, sold his dog because he couldn’t feed him, then wrote the script that changed his life and refused to sell it unless he played the lead. It also goes further back, into a childhood he has rarely discussed, and forward into what the climb cost him.

Sly wrote the book to share the falls as much as the victories, and in the hope that anyone who has been told “no” often enough will recognise their own story in it.

The Steps is available in hardcover, large print paperback, ebook and audiobook, read by Sly himself.

Order The Steps

Ahead of publication, Sly sat down with Lulu Garcia-Navarro for The New York Times podcast The Interview. It’s a long, unhurried conversation, and he answers questions about the childhood he describes in the book, the school where he was sent as a teenager, the toll that fifty years of pushing his body took on him, the missteps in Hollywood he still thinks about, and more with stunning honesty.

Want more? Sly also spoke to Tracy Smith on CBS Sunday Morning this weekend, and you can read an excerpt from The Steps in which he recalls the moment the idea for Rocky arrived.