Like Pip, the plucky hero of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Gotham Feature and Nonfiction teacher Cliff Hopkinson has certainly made his way in the world.

It began with an epiphany, in Manchester, England.  At the age of sixteen, a headmaster recommended that Cliff drop out of school and pursue journalism.  Once the words were spoken, Cliff says “the room filled with golden stars” and he knew that’s what he would do.  Right away he became a cub reporter for a newspaper in a nearby mill town, where he “did everything you can do on a newspaper.”

Then … London called.  Cliff landed a job at the movie magazine Picturegoer, where he mingled with movie stars and learned magazines.  Next, he moved to Illustrated, a photojournalism magazine that had fascinated him as a child, and worked his way up to deputy editor.  After that, he hit “the acme,” a job with the best newspaper in the UK, The Observer, where he would eventually become deputy managing editor. But Cliff wasn’t done rising in the world.

Next he tried something different, founding Gemini, a publishing company that specialized in information kits — collections of documents and artifacts on a certain subject.  Their biggest hit was the international bestseller Touchdown on the Moon, a kit about the flight of Apollo 11, released shortly before the historic mission.

Among the highlights, the kit contained a flight plan that would allow people to follow the mission as it happened.  Cliff knew the flight plan was an essential part of the kit, so when NASA refused to give him the necessary information, he found it on his own.  Cliff did his research so well even NASA was astonished at the flight plan’s accuracy. (Secret lunches were involved, along with documents in a plain brown envelope.)

After the moon, what next for Cliff?  America!

He took a job as the deputy editor of U.S. News & World Report in Washington DC.  When he announced to his colleagues that “the truth is dead” in this country, they looked at him in amazement.  They already knew that.  So, armed with his pluck and journalistic skill, Cliff set about shedding light on even the murkiest corners of the U.S. government.

Next stop for Cliff: the whole world.  He moved to New York to become the managing editor of Condé Nast Traveler, the gold standard of travel magazines.

After retiring from full-time journalism, Cliff wasn’t done setting high expectations for himself.  He took up teaching at Gotham, where he had studied fiction during his early days in New York.  Will this man ever stop?  If you meet him, you’ll know the answer.