Before a meteoric rise to the top of Finnish politics Kalevi Sorsa worked as publishing editor, with his greatest "claim to fame" being to turn down the first novel of Kalle Päätalo, which turned out to be one of the greatest Finnish bestsellers of all time. Sorsa was brought in from this relative obscurity by Rafael Paasio to assume the influential post of party secretary without much previous experience of politics.
One of the most strongwilled but also thinskinned public figures, Sorsa had numerous bitter relations with other politicians and the whole of the media, which he lambasted by coining a pejorative epithet "infokratia".
The fact that he never attained the Finnish presidency, nor even candidacy for the post, was a cause of lasting bitterness, and his memoirs were not lacking in barbs towards his predecessors, contemporaries and successors.