Steve Wasserman graduated from UC Berkeley in 1974 with a degree in criminology. A former deputy editor of the Op-Ed page and Sunday Opinion section of the Los Angeles Times, he was later appointed editor of the paper‘s Sunday Book Review section. He was also editorial director of New Republic Books; Hill and Wang at Farrar , Straus & Giroux; and Times Books at Random House.

Later, he was a partner of Kneerim and Williams, a literary agency, where he represented numerous authors, including Christopher Hitchens, David Thomson, and Linda Ronstadt.

Prior to becoming publisher of Heyday in 2016, an independent nonprofit based in Berkeley, he was editor at large for Yale University Press.