Eszterhás was born in Csákánydoroszló, a village in Hungary to Roman Catholic parents, Mária (née Bíró) and István Eszterhás. Eszterhás was born during World War II, and lived as a child in a refugee camp in Allied-occupied Austria. The family eventually moved to New York City, and then to immigrant neighborhoods in Cleveland, where Eszterhas spent most of his childhood. Eszterhas learned, at age 45, that his father had concealed his World War II collaboration in Hungary’s Arrow Cross Party government after the German occupation of Hungary and that he had "organized book burnings and had produced anti-Semitic propaganda."p.201 Eszterhas later described his father’s anti-Semitic pamphlets as “like the Hungarian version of Mein Kampf.” After this discovery, he cut his father out of his life entirely, never reconciling before his father's death in 2001.
Eszterhas was a senior editor for Rolling Stone from 1971 to 1975.
He became a National Book Award nominee for his nonfiction work Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse in 1974.

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