John Jakes


John William Jakes is an American writer, best known for American historical fiction. His Civil War trilogy, North and South, has sold millions of copies worldwide. He is also the author of The Kent Family Chronicles. He has used the pen name Jay Scotland.

Early life and education

Jakes was born in Chicago, Illinois. He first sold stories to pulp magazines while still in college in the early 1950s. Jakes 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. He and Rachel, to whom had been married for 13 months at the time, appeared on the game show Beat the Clock on August 23, 1952. Although they failed to complete the Bonus Round, Rachel won for them a Sylvania "Jefferson" 20" screen television set. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8NWqHrXAmY

Writing career

Thrilling Wonder Stories, edited by Sam Merwin, published two 1949–1950 letters from Jakes and two of his stories were published in pulp magazines edited by Howard Browne late in 1950, The Dreaming Trees and "Your Number is Up!". ISFDB catalogs 28 more speculative fiction stories published 1951 to 1953. Jakes published dozens of stories and several novels during the twenty 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 a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loose-knit group of heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s and led by Lin Carter. The eight original members were self-selected by fantasy credentials alone. They sought to promote the popularity and respectability of the "Sword and Sorcery" sub genre.
Jakes 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. He has since published several more popular works of historical fiction, most dealing with American history, including the North and South trilogy about the U.S. Civil War, which sold 10 million copies and was adapted as an ABC-TV miniseries.

Personal

Jakes lives in Florida with his wife, Rachel, to whom he has been married since 1951. They have four grown children: Andrea, Ellen, J. Michael, and Victoria.

Works

Mainstream novels

The Kent Family Chronicles

Brak the Barbarian

The Bastard was adapted as a television mini-series by Universal Pictures Television as the first offering of the highly successful syndicated package, Operation Prime Time. It was followed by The Rebels and The Seekers. The North and South trilogy was made into three mini-series on ABC in the 1980s and 1990s.