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  Author Info About the Author Articles (Index) Interviews (Index) | About the Author John Sandford was born John Camp on February 23, 1944, in
Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He attended the public schools in Cedar Rapids, graduating
from Washington High School in 1962. He then spent four years at the University
of Iowa, graduating with a bachelor's degree in American Studies in 1966. In
1966, he married Susan Lee Jones of Cedar Rapids, a fellow student at the
University of Iowa. He was in the U.S. Army from 1966-68, worked as a reporter
for the Cape Girardeau Southeast Missourian from 1968-1970, and went
back to the University of Iowa from 1970-1971, where he received a master's
degree in journalism. He was a reporter for The Miami Herald from
1971-78, and then a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer-Press from
1978-1990; in 1980, he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and he won the
Pulitzer in 1986 for a series of stories about a midwestern farm crisis. From
1990 to the present he has written thriller novels. He's also the author of
two non-fiction books, one on plastic surgery and one on art. He is the
principal financial backer of a major archeological project in the Jordan
Valley of Israel, with a website at www.rehov.org In addition to archaeology, he is
deeply interested in art (painting) and photography. He both hunts and fishes.
He has two children, Roswell and Emily, and one grandson, Benjamin. His wife,
Susan, died of metastasized breast cancer in May, 2007, and is greatly
missed. His real name isn't John Sandford? No. His real name is John Roswell Camp. When it became
apparent that Rules of Prey and The Fool's Run were going to come out three
months apart, Putnam asked him to come up with a pseudonym for Rules of Prey, as the publisher felt the books
were dissimilar enough to create a marketing problem. Sandford was his paternal
great-grandfather's family name, and his father's middle name. Camp is a civil
war buff, and Henry Sandford fought with the Belle City Rifles, which was part
of the Union Army's Iron Brigade, in that war. When did he start writing? He started writing in grade school, although his first
real encouragement came in his senior year in High School, when an
English teacher told him that he had a nice talent for it. Did he major in writing (in some form) in college? Not at first. He went to the University of Iowa and graduated
in 1966 with a degree in American Studies. He wrote articles for The Daily
Iowan, the university newspaper, but didn't get seriously involved in
journalism until he was in the army. He did take a couple of courses at the
university's writer's workshop. How long was he a journalist? He worked the Miami Herald from 1971 to 1978.
In 1978 he moved to the Twin Cities and started working for the St.
Paul Pioneer Press. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in
1980, for a series of stories on Native American culture. In 1986 he won the Pulitzer for Non-Deadline Feature
Writing for a series of stories collectively titled "Life on the Land:
An American Farm Family." The series, written during the midwest farm
crisis, followed a typical southwest Minnesota farm family through the
course of a full year. He stopped writing full-time for the Pioneer Press in
1989, although he didn't stop writing for them entirely until the next year. In
1996 he wrote a ten-years-later follow-up to "Life on the Land," and he's
written occasional book reviews for the Fort Worth Star Telegram, but
he hasn't gone back to full-time journalism. How many novels did he write before he got one accepted? He wrote two novels that weren't accepted before he wrote The Fool's Run. The first, The Wheel Key
Number, was a perhaps too-realistic detective story. The second, The
Chippewa Zoo, was a near-future low-tech science fiction novel. They were
never published by anyone, and they never will be. He also wrote an untitled
ghost novel in 1993, but after some discussion, it was not published, the
feeling being that it was too much of a divergence at that early point in his
thriller writing career. |
13 May 2008 The Prey series, the Virgil Flowers series,
the Kidd series, The Night Crew, Dead Watch, The Eye
and the Heart: The Watercolors of John Stuart Ingle, and Plastic
Surgery: The Kindest Cut are copyrighted by John Sandford. All excerpts are
used with permission. All original content on the website (excluding the message
board and some other specifically disclaimed text) is copyright © 2008 by
Roswell Anthony Camp. Please do not steal anything from these pages. If you
want to borrow something, write and ask first. Help keep moofs happy. | |