[2] In addition to writing 18 books with Gregory White Smith, Naifeh is a businessman who founded several companies, including Best Lawyers[3] that spawned an industry of professional rankings.

[1] The Philadelphia Inquirer called the book "Brilliant and definitive … so absorbing in its narrative drive and so exhaustively detailed that it makes everything that came before seem like trial balloons.

"[6] Van Gogh: The Life, which Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called "magisterial,"[7] was published in 2011 with a companion website hosting over 6,000 pages of notes.

He later studied, at age fifteen, with Bruce Onobrakpeya, one of the leading Nigerian artists of the twentieth century, who received the Living Human Treasure Award from UNSCO in 2006.

[9] Naifeh worked as an intern in the office of Congressman Charlie Wilson, as a docent at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and as an associate attorney at the law firm of Milbank Tweed.

[26] He published Jackson Pollock: An American Saga in 1989, which won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography[27] and was also a finalist for the National Book Award.

[32] Time Magazine wrote: "Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, whose 1989 biography of Jackson Pollock won the Pulitzer Prize, have written this generation's definitive portrait of the great Dutch post-Impressionist.

… Their most important achievement is to produce a reckoning with van Gogh's occasional 'madness' that doesn't lose sight of the lucidity and intelligence – the profound sanity – of his art.

"[34] In addition to English, Van Gogh: The Life has been published in Chinese, Dutch, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Vietnamese.

[35] Naifeh and Smith also wrote several how-to books to fund the writing of Pollock, including (with Michael Morgenstern), the best-seller How to Make Love to a Woman, which sold several million copies in 29 languages.

[12] Humanities Magazine noted that Naifeh's "tessellating works explore the threads weaving together traditional Islamic art and the Geometric Abstraction movement.

"[42] The Free Times wrote that the exhibition offered "many rich ideas for exploration: formal beauty, the nature of abstraction, how art and math intersect, and insights into the cultural expressions of" the Middle East.

With Smith, he also founded Best Doctors, a company dedicated to helping others with undiagnosed or seemingly untreatable medical illnesses find the best medicine anywhere in the world.