Cohen was born into a Jewish family in Lake Forest, Illinois, and grew up in Chicago's North Shore suburb of Glencoe.
[3] An admirer of the works of journalists A. J. Liebling, Ian Frazier, and Joseph Mitchell, Cohen took a job as a messenger at the offices of The New Yorker magazine,[4] where he published twelve stories in the "Talk of the Town" section in eighteen months.
In 2010, Cohen co-wrote the memoir When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead, the story of American film producer Jerry Weintraub.
[8] Cohen's story of United Fruit president and banana king Sam Zemurray, The Fish That Ate the Whale, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2012.
[12] Cohen's 2019 book, The Last Pirate of New York: A Ghost Ship, a Killer, and the Birth of a Gangster Nation, details the life and times of Albert W. Hicks, an American criminal active from about 1840 to 1860.
[15] In 2013, NPR editor Tina Brown called Cohen's essay on the financier Ted Forstmann "very entertaining" and a "must read".
[17] Another New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, called it "exuberant" and "a vivid narrative"; Cohen's book had "taken the noise of these facts and turned it from gunfire into a kind of music".
"[22] In The Christian Science Monitor, critic Chris Hartman called the book "masterful and elegantly written ... a cautionary tale for the ages".
"[24] Reviewing The Adventures of Herbie Cohen, World's Greatest Negotiator in the Wall Street Journal, Ed Kosner called the work, "[A] treat of a new book."
But the accumulated wit and wisdom of Herb Cohen scattered through the book reveals instead a keen grasp of human frailty and a gift for aphorism no less valid for its glibness," explaining, "it’s essentially the saga of a remarkable man who’s fond of saying 'The meaning of life .