John William Jakes (born 1932) is a writer of fiction, best known for American Historical fiction. Jakes 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. After earning an M.A. in American literature from Ohio State University, he published several stories and novels over the next 20 years, 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, John Jakes was also a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), 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.
John Jakes gained widespread popularity with the publication of his Kent
Family Chronicles, which became a bestselling 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 turned into an ABC-TV miniseries.
John Jakes lives in South Carolina and Florida with his wife, Rachel, to whom he has been married since 1951.
