Reading List

Authors Like Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese was born in Queens in 1942 and grew up in Little Italy, an asthmatic boy who could not play sports and was taken to the movies instead. He went to a preparatory seminary meaning to become a priest, left after a year, and studied at NYU, where his first feature, I Call First — later Who's That Knocking at My Door — was made in 1967. A young Chicago critic called Roger Ebert reviewed it and called it “a great moment in American movies”. Half a century later Scorsese is a writer about cinema as much as a maker of it: the interviews in Scorsese on Scorsese, the history he narrates in A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, and “Il Maestro”, his March 2021 essay in Harper's on Fellini, which complained that the art form was being “reduced to its lowest common denominator, ‘content.’” Readers come to him for film history treated as a living inheritance, and for the subjects he keeps returning to — guilt, faith, violence and New York. The writers below either think about cinema the way he talks about it, or wrote the books he turned into films.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Film writing · Faith · The books behind the films · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Martin Scorsese, start with Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and writes about film with the same moral seriousness, and Roger Ebert, the critic who championed him from his first feature. For a director's love of 1970s cinema on the page, Quentin Tarantino. And for the faith and guilt at the centre of his work, the novelists he adapted: Shūsaku Endō and Nikos Kazantzakis.

10 authors like Martin Scorsese

01
The screenwriter · Closest match

Paul Schrader

American · b. 1946 · Screenwriter

Schrader grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the strict Calvinist Christian Reformed Church, and did not see a film until he was seventeen. Encouraged by Pauline Kael, he became a critic, and in 1972 published Transcendental Style in Film, on Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer. He wrote Taxi Driver (1976), co-wrote Raging Bull (1980), adapted The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and wrote Bringing Out the Dead (1999) for Scorsese; First Reformed brought him his first Oscar nomination.

The writer closest to the heart of Scorsese's work: the lonely, guilty men of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull start on Schrader's pages. Where Scorsese's Catholicism is warm and operatic, Schrader's Calvinism is austere, and Transcendental Style in Film is the best book on why both of them treat a film as something close to a religious act.

— Lisanne
02
The critic who saw him first

Roger Ebert

American · b. 1942 · Film critic · Pulitzer 1975

Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times and in 1975 became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. He wrote the first published review of Scorsese's first feature in 1967, and collected four decades of writing about his films in Scorsese by Ebert (2008). The Great Movies (2002) gathers his essays on a hundred classic films; Life Itself (2011) is his memoir.

Ebert writes about film the way Scorsese talks about it: with total recall, open enthusiasm and no condescension towards popular movies. Scorsese by Ebert is the obvious place to start, but The Great Movies is the better companion — a canon assembled by a critic with the same appetite for old films that Scorsese has spent his life restoring.

— Lisanne

Every book by Roger Ebert →

03
A director's film criticism

Quentin Tarantino

American · b. 1963 · Filmmaker

Tarantino is the writer-director of Pulp Fiction and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and published a novel version of the latter in 2021. Cinema Speculation (2022) is a book of film criticism and memoir about the American films of the 1970s he saw as a boy in Los Angeles, with a long section on Taxi Driver.

The nearest thing in print to Scorsese's own film-history talks: one director arguing, film by film, about the decade that made him. Tarantino is louder and more provocative, and his taste runs further into exploitation cinema, but the conviction underneath — that these films matter and deserve close argument — is the same.

— Lisanne

Every book by Quentin Tarantino →

04
New Hollywood, on the page

Francis Ford Coppola

American · b. 1939 · Filmmaker

Coppola directed the Godfather films and Apocalypse Now, and came up in the same generation of American directors as Scorsese in the late 1960s and 1970s. The Godfather Notebook (2016) reproduces the annotated copy of Mario Puzo's novel he used to plan the film; Live Cinema and Its Techniques (2017) records his experiments with filming and broadcasting a drama live.

The other great Italian-American chronicler of crime and family, and the other director of his generation who writes about craft. The Godfather Notebook shows, page by page, how a novel becomes a film — exactly the process behind Scorsese's adaptations — and it is the best book here for readers who want to see how a director thinks.

— Lisanne

Every book by Francis Ford Coppola →

05
Faith and guilt, from Sweden

Ingmar Bergman

Swedish · b. 1918 · Filmmaker

Bergman, the son of a Lutheran pastor, directed The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and Fanny and Alexander, and worked in theatre throughout his life. The Magic Lantern (1987) is his autobiography; Images: My Life in Film (1990) goes through his films one by one.

Scorsese has named Bergman among his major influences, and the overlap is in subject rather than style: a religious childhood that never quite lets go, and men tormented by a God who seems silent. The Magic Lantern is one of the great artists' memoirs and reads well even if you have seen few of the films.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ingmar Bergman →

06
The master he played Van Gogh for

Akira Kurosawa

Japanese · b. 1910 · Filmmaker

Kurosawa directed Rashomon, which won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951, Seven Samurai and Ran. His memoir Something Like an Autobiography covers his life up to Rashomon. In 1990 Scorsese played Vincent van Gogh in Kurosawa's Dreams.

Kurosawa is the director whose work most clearly shows what Scorsese means by film history as an inheritance: a Japanese filmmaker shaped by American westerns who went on to shape American directors in turn. The memoir is about apprenticeship — how a painter became a director by learning from older masters — which is Scorsese's own story told in another country.

— Lisanne

Every book by Akira Kurosawa →

07
The novel behind Silence

Shūsaku Endō

Japanese · b. 1923 · Novelist · Akutagawa Prize 1955

Endō was a Japanese Catholic novelist who won the Akutagawa Prize in 1955. Silence (1966) follows two Portuguese Jesuit priests who travel to seventeenth-century Japan, where Christians are being persecuted, and asks what faith means when God does not answer. Scorsese spent decades trying to film it, and released his adaptation in 2016.

The book that sits closest to Scorsese's own religious questions. Endō writes about apostasy and doubt with no easy consolation, and Silence is the most direct statement of the theme that runs under Mean Streets, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ: how to live as a believer in a world that punishes belief.

— Lisanne
08
Christ, made human

Nikos Kazantzakis

Greek · b. 1883 · Novelist

Kazantzakis was a Cretan novelist, poet and translator, best known for Zorba the Greek (1946). The Last Temptation of Christ (1955) imagines Jesus struggling with human desire and fear up to the cross. Scorsese's 1988 film of the novel, adapted by Paul Schrader, drew protests from Christian groups.

Scorsese's most personal project came from this novel, and it is easy to see why: Kazantzakis makes the spiritual life a physical fight, which is how Scorsese films it. Read it for the same mix of reverence and transgression — a deeply religious book that many religious readers found blasphemous.

— Lisanne
09
New York's other underworld

Edith Wharton

American · b. 1862 · Novelist · Pulitzer 1921

Wharton wrote about the closed world of old New York society she was born into. The Age of Innocence (1920), about a lawyer torn between his fiancée and her unconventional cousin in the 1870s, made her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 1921. Scorsese filmed it in 1993.

It looks like the odd one out, but Scorsese treated it as a companion to his gangster films: a tribe with its own codes, rituals and quiet violence against anyone who breaks them. Wharton watches upper-class Manhattan as closely as Scorsese watches Little Italy, and she is just as interested in what the rules cost the people who obey them.

— Lisanne

Every book by Edith Wharton →

10
The reporting behind Killers of the Flower Moon

David Grann

American · b. 1967 · Reporter

Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Killers of the Flower Moon (2017) reconstructs the murders of members of the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma, after oil made them rich, and the case the young FBI took on. It won the 2018 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and was a National Book Award finalist; Scorsese's film of it was released in 2023.

Grann gives Scorsese's late subject — organised greed, and the ordinary men who commit murder for money — its full historical weight. The book is structured as a detective story, where Scorsese's film tells it from inside the conspiracy; reading both shows how differently the same facts can be framed.

— Lisanne

Every book by David Grann →

Where to start if you loved Martin Scorsese

If you want the mind behind Taxi Driver, read Paul Schrader.

Transcendental Style in Film, then Schrader on Schrader.

If you want a guide to the films he loves, read Roger Ebert.

The Great Movies: a hundred essays to watch your way through.

If you want Silence on the page, read Shūsaku Endō.

Silence itself, the novel he spent decades trying to film.

If you want 1970s cinema argued about, read Quentin Tarantino.

Cinema Speculation, starting with the Taxi Driver section.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Martin Scorsese

Who should I read if I love Martin Scorsese?

Paul Schrader first — he wrote Taxi Driver and co-wrote Raging Bull, and his Transcendental Style in Film explains the religious seriousness both men bring to cinema. Roger Ebert reviewed Scorsese's first feature in 1967 and wrote about him for four decades. Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation is a director's love letter to the 1970s. And for his themes of faith and guilt, read the novelists he adapted: Shūsaku Endō and Nikos Kazantzakis.

What books has Martin Scorsese written?

Most of Scorsese's books are built from interviews and talks rather than written from scratch. Scorsese on Scorsese, edited by Ian Christie and David Thompson, collects interviews about his films; A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, with Michael Henry Wilson, accompanies his documentary history of American cinema. His essay “Il Maestro”, on Federico Fellini, appeared in Harper's in March 2021.

What books are like Scorsese on Scorsese?

Schrader on Schrader (2004) is the closest: the same interview format, about the screenwriter of several of Scorsese's films. Ingmar Bergman's Images: My Life in Film (1990) goes through a director's work film by film in his own words. For criticism of the same films, Roger Ebert's Scorsese by Ebert (2008).

Which Martin Scorsese films are based on books?

Many of them. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) is from Nikos Kazantzakis's novel, The Age of Innocence (1993) from Edith Wharton, Shutter Island (2010) from Dennis Lehane, Hugo (2011) from Brian Selznick, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) from Jordan Belfort's memoir, Silence (2016) from Shūsaku Endō, The Irishman (2019) from Charles Brandt's I Heard You Paint Houses, and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) from David Grann.

Did Ingmar Bergman influence Martin Scorsese?

Yes. Scorsese has cited Bergman among his major influences, alongside Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The connection is mostly in subject: both directors grew up in strongly religious households and keep returning to guilt and to a God who does not answer. Bergman's autobiography, The Magic Lantern (1987), is the best way into him on the page.

Is Quentin Tarantino similar to Martin Scorsese?

In their love of film history, yes: both are directors who learned from watching enormous numbers of films and talk about them in detail. Tarantino's Cinema Speculation (2022) includes a long section on Taxi Driver. Their films are different, though — Tarantino is playful and built from genre, where Scorsese is more concerned with sin and consequence.

Footnotes

  1. Martin Scorsese — Wikipedia
  2. Il Maestro: Federico Fellini and the lost magic of cinema — Harper's, March 2021
  3. Paul Schrader — Wikipedia
  4. Roger Ebert — Wikipedia
  5. Cinema Speculation extract on Taxi Driver — Empire
  6. Who's That Knocking at My Door — Wikipedia
  7. Edith Wharton — Wikipedia
  8. David Grann — Wikipedia

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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