John Jakes

John William Jakes is an American writer, best known for American historical fiction. Jakes was born in Chicago, Illinois. He first sold stories to pulp magazines while still in college in the early 1950s. He studied creative writing at DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana, graduating in 1953. He then earned an M.A. in American literature from The Ohio State University. Jakes published several stories and novels over the 20 years following completion of college, many of them fantasy fiction, science fiction and westerns and other sorts of historical fiction, while working in the... advertising industry. In 1971, he began to write full time. During this time, he was also a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America , a loose-knit group of heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies. He gained widespread popularity with the publication of his Kent Family Chronicles, which became a bestselling American Bicentennial Series of books in the mid to late 1970s, selling 55 million copies.
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