Level 1 — Absolute Beginner

Sylvester Stallone is a famous American actor. He is most famous for the film Rocky. Rocky is about a poor boxer who gets one big chance.

Now Stallone has written a book about his life. The book is called The Steps. It comes out on 29 September 2026. The publisher is William Morrow.

In the book he tells a story about the past. He had almost no money. His wife was going to have a baby. He walked around his neighbourhood at three in the morning. He could not sleep.

He wanted to write a story about people who give up their dreams. He chose boxing for the story. He says life is a fight from your first day. So his hero became a real boxer.

actor

A person whose job is to perform in films or plays.

famous

Known by very many people.

boxer

A person who fights as a sport, wearing gloves.

memoir

A book in which someone writes about their own life.

publisher

A company that prints and sells books.

neighbourhood

The area around where you live.

dream

Something you really hope to do one day.

hero

The main good character in a story.

Level 2 — Elementary

Sylvester Stallone is publishing a memoir called The Steps. William Morrow, part of HarperCollins, releases it on 29 September 2026. The part of the book that has already been printed in the press describes the weeks in the mid 1970s when he was writing the screenplay for Rocky.

At that time he was almost broke. He had recently sold the rights to another screenplay, Paradise Alley, for very little money. His wife was expecting a baby. He describes walking through his neighbourhood at three in the morning, arguing with himself about whether he could really write anything good.

His first idea was to write directly about himself, a struggling actor who could not get a break. He decided that would not work. A story about an actor was too small and too personal. He needed something that stood for the same feeling but that anyone could understand.

So he looked for a symbol. He noticed that many people around him had quietly given up on their dreams, not because they lacked talent but because nobody ever gave them a chance. Boxing gave him the picture he wanted. Life, he writes, is a fight from the day you take your first breath. Once he accepted that, the answer was obvious. His hero would not just feel like a fighter. He would be one.

screenplay

The written script of a film.

broke

Having no money at all.

rights

Legal permission to use or sell something such as a story.

struggling

Trying hard but having great difficulty succeeding.

get a break

To get a lucky chance that helps you succeed.

symbol

Something that stands for a bigger idea.

talent

A natural ability to do something well.

obvious

Very easy to see or understand.

Level 3 — Intermediate

Fifty years after Rocky turned an unknown actor into a household name, Sylvester Stallone has written the account of how the script came to exist. The Steps, published by William Morrow on 29 September 2026, is a memoir, and the excerpt already circulating in the press concentrates on the least glamorous stretch of his life: the weeks before he had anything to show anybody.

The circumstances were unpromising in a specific and quantifiable way. He had sold the rights to an earlier screenplay, Paradise Alley, for almost nothing, a transaction he clearly still regards as instructive. Money was short and a child was on the way, which is the combination that converts artistic ambition into pressure. His response was to walk. He describes wandering the neighbourhood at three in the morning, conducting an argument with himself about whether he had any business writing at all.

The creative decision at the centre of the excerpt is more interesting than the hardship. His instinct was to write what he knew, an actor unable to get anyone to look at him. He rejected it, and the reason he gives is a genuine piece of craft. A story about a struggling actor is a story about show business, and show business is a niche. The feeling he wanted to capture was far more widely held: the quiet abandonment of ambition by people who never received an opportunity, rather than people who lacked ability.

That reframing required a symbol, and boxing supplied it. His formulation, that life is a fight from the day you take your first breath, is the kind of line that looks simple and does a great deal of structural work. Once the metaphor was accepted, literalising it was the obvious next move. The protagonist should not merely resemble a fighter; he should be one, so that every punch carries the second meaning without anybody having to explain it. That instinct is why Rocky reads as a story about dignity rather than a story about sport, and it is the reason the film outlived its budget, its reviews and its era.

household name

A person or thing that almost everyone has heard of.

excerpt

A short part taken from a longer written work.

unpromising

Showing little sign of future success.

instructive

Providing a useful lesson.

niche

A small, specialised area of interest.

reframing

Looking at something from a different point of view.

literalise

To turn something figurative into something actual.

protagonist

The main character in a story.

Level 4 — Advanced

There is a familiar genre of celebrity memoir in which the origin story has been polished so many times that it no longer contains information. The excerpt from Sylvester Stallone's The Steps, which William Morrow publishes on 29 September 2026, is more useful than that, because it preserves the reasoning rather than only the outcome. What it records is not simply that a broke actor wrote Rocky, a fact long since absorbed into American folklore, but the specific sequence of rejected choices by which he arrived at a boxer.

The material conditions are sketched without self pity and with a detail that matters: he had disposed of the rights to Paradise Alley for a trivial sum, and a child was imminent. The combination is worth noting because it inverts the romantic account of creative freedom. He was not writing unencumbered; he was writing against a deadline imposed by biology and rent, which is the condition under which most work actually gets made. The three in the morning walks he describes read less as inspiration seeking than as the ordinary insomnia of somebody doing arithmetic he does not like.

The decisive move is a piece of dramaturgy that any writer could learn from. His first instinct, the autobiographical one, was an actor nobody would see. He discarded it on grounds of scope rather than quality: a narrative about the film industry addresses an audience already interested in the film industry, and the emotion he had identified was not industry specific. What he had noticed, and what the excerpt states plainly, is that the people around him had surrendered their ambitions for want of an opportunity and not for want of capacity. That is a distinction with enormous reach, and it required a vehicle general enough to carry it.

Boxing was that vehicle, justified by a sentence doing more work than its plainness suggests: life is a fight from the day you take your first breath. Having accepted the metaphor, Stallone declined to leave it figurative, and the choice to make the protagonist an actual fighter is what allows the film to operate on two registers simultaneously without a word of commentary. It is also, incidentally, a lesson in why the picture has outlasted its contemporaries. Rocky was never a sports film that happened to be moving; it was a film about being counted out, in which the sport functioned as a translation device. Fifty years on, the memoir's contribution is to show that this was deliberate, arrived at on foot, at night, by someone with every reason to settle for less.

folklore

Stories and beliefs widely shared within a culture.

trivial sum

An amount of money so small it hardly matters.

imminent

About to happen very soon.

unencumbered

Free from burdens or restrictions.

dramaturgy

The craft of constructing a drama or story.

scope

The range of subjects or people something covers.