Sam Apple received an undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan. After Michigan, he studied writing at Columbia University in the Master of Fine Arts program.
Apple is the author of Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection. Liveright editor Robert Weil solicited the book after reading one of Apple's articles in The New York Times Magazine. Apple has also written two books for Ballantine Books, Schlepping Through the Alps: My Search for Austria's Jewish Past with Its Last Wandering Shepherd and American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland. Apple is on the faculty of the MA in Science Writing program at Johns Hopkins University. He has also been an adjunct professor of creative writing and entrepreneurial journalism at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a finalist for the PEN America Award for a first work of non-fiction.
