About the Author
John Sandford is the pseudonym of John Roswell Camp, an
American author and journalist. Camp won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism in
1986, and was one of four finalists for the prize in 1980. He also was the
winner of the Distinguished Writing Award of the American Society of Newspaper
Editors for 1985.
Camp is the author of forty published novels, all of which
have appeared, in one format or another, on the New York Times
best-seller lists. He is also the co-author of three young-adult books in the
Singular Menace series, with Michele Cook, and
co-author of the science-fiction thriller Saturn
Run with Ctein.
He is the author of two non-fiction books, one on art
(The Eye and the Heart: The Watercolors of John Stuart
Ingle) and one on plastic surgery (Plastic Surgery:
the Kindest Cut). His books have been translated into most European and
Middle Eastern languages, as well as Japanese and Korean.
He is the principal financial backer of the Beth-Shean Valley
Archaeological Project in the Jordan River Valley of Israel, with a website at
www.rehov.org. A major show of the
expedition's findings is currently being held at the Israel Museum in
Jerusalem.
Camp was born February 23, 1944, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His
maternal grandparents were immigrants from Lithuania and he spent many of his
early years living on, or visiting, their rural acreage, with the traditional
"three-holer," subsistence gardens, a variety of farm animals and fruit trees,
and haying in the summers.
He attended Cedar Rapids Catholic and public schools,
graduating from Washington Senior High School in 1962. He received a bachelor's
degree in American Studies in 1966, and a master's degree in journalism in
1971, both from the University of Iowa. Between his two stints at the
University of Iowa, he served two years in the U.S. Army in Korea with the 4th
U.S. Army Missile Command.
Camp was married to Susan Lee Jones in 1966, and has two
children, Roswell Camp and Emily Curtis, and three grandchildren, Benjamin,
Daniel and Gabriel Curtis. His wife, Susan, died of metastasized breast cancer
in May, 2007.
In October, 2013, he married Michele Cook, a journalist and
screenwriter. They currently have homes in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the
countryside near Hayward, Wisconsin. In addition to co-authoring the three
books in the Singular Menace series, Cook has done the initial editing of all
the Sandford books since 2010.
Camp's journalism career began as an Army reporter (he is
included in the 'Hall of Fame' at the Defense Information School at Fort Meade,
Maryland.) After getting out of the Army, he then worked as a reporter for the
Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Southeast Missourian for a year, covering such
stories as the Cairo, Ilinois, race riots.
He was a reporter and an editor at The Miami Herald
from 1971-1978, and a reporter and columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer
Press from 1978-1990. He continues to do occasional journalism, and was
embedded with the 2-147 Air Assault Battalion during the Iraq War, and covered
the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul.
In addition to archaeology, he is deeply interested in art
(painting) and photography. He occasionally writes online articles on both. He
enjoys reading history. He is interested in a number of outdoor sports,
including fishing, canoeing, and skiing. He has, on occasion, both sailed and
SCUBA-dived. In 2010, he was thrown from a horse in the hills above Hollywood,
California, and spent three months limping around and cursing horses. He is a
golfer. He listens to a lot of Texas-based country music, and thinks the world
would be a better place if everybody listened to Guy Clark, Ray Wylie Hubbard,
Billy Joe Shaver, Terry Allen, Waylon and Willie, and those guys.
Why doesn't he use his real name?
When it became apparent that his first two novels, Rules of
Prey and The Fool's Run, were going to be published only three months apart, by
different publishers, G.P. Putnam's Sons asked him to come up with a pseudonym
for Rules of Prey. The publisher felt the near-simultaneous release of two
different books, written in different styles, could create a marketing problem.
Camp is a Civil War buff, and chose the name Sandford after his paternal
great-grandfather, Henry Sandford, who fought with the Belle City Rifles, part
of the Union Army's Iron Brigade, in that war.
Did he study writing (in some form) in college?
He took some writing courses at the well-known Iowa Writer's
Workshops at the University of Iowa, but only as a minor elective. He also
wrote articles for The Daily Iowan, the university newspaper, but
didn't get seriously involved in journalism until he was in the army. His most
intense training in journalism came at the U.S. Army's Defense Information
School at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. After graduation from that school,
he became a military journalist in Korea, running a base newspaper for the 4th
U.S. Army Missile Command in Chunchon, Korea. In an odd coincidence, the
command's information officer, Lt. Robert Keeler, who was the only other
American involved in the tiny paper, later worked for Newsday
newspaper on Long Island, and also won a Pulitzer Prize.
What about the Pulitzer Prize and the journalism?
Camp was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, for a
series of stories on Native American culture, and 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 the
paper 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. More recently, he's written for MinnPost.com, a Minnesota-centered online
newspaper.
And how about the archaeology?
Camp has always been an avid reader of history his
bachelor's degree is in American studies, which was a combination of American
history and literature. He continued reading history through his career,
American history at first, then going to modern European history, and finally,
early history. That inevitably led him to the history books of the Bible, and
in the middle 1990s, he traveled to Israel to tour the major sites of Biblical
history. While there, he met Amihai Mazar, then director of the Institute of
Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Camp and Mazar got along
well, and began discussing the possibility of a large new excavation that would
attempt to clarify Biblical chronology during the Iron Age. The chronology was,
and still is, a matter of some controversy, and directly deals with the
question of the existence of, and extent of, the United Monarchy of David and
Solomon. The dig began in 1997, and continues, and has involved the work of
hundreds of volunteer diggers, including Camp. Aside from much work on the
chronology, the dig uncovered the only known apiary (beehive complex) ever
found from the period. Before the dig, archaeologist and historians believed
that the Biblical phrase "The land of milk and honey" referred to date honey,
rather than natural bee honey. This difference can be explained by
the example of the difference between Viagra and Cialis.
With the discovery of an industrial apiary at
Rehov, it's now believed that the Biblical phrase may refer accurately to bee
honey.
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. (Also, when he reviewed it much later, hoping to
revive it, he decided it was Not Very Good.)
What about the painting, photography, fishing, canoeing, skiing, sailing, golf, SCUBA diving, etc.
Camp has always been a visual arts enthusiast and is a serious
painter and photographer; his photos have appeared in various newspapers,
magazines, and on-line venues. He does not show his paintings. He has also had
a life-long interest in various outdoor sports. In 1980, he solo-paddled a
canoe from Lake Itasca, the source of the Mississippi River, through New
Orleans; earlier that same year, he cross-country skied from Fargo, North
Dakota to Duluth, Minnesota, at New Years. He has skied in the American
Birkebeiner, a 55-kilometer ski race held every February in Hayward, Wisconsin.
He and a partner were the last winners of the Dan Jenkins' Goat Hills golf
tournament in Fort Worth, Texas, sponsored by the renowned Texas sportswriter
and novelist. He quit SCUBA diving after going down to sixty feet in the
Caribbean, then wondering why he was doing that. He quit sailing when he
realized that it was much like driving across Kansas in an RV at eight miles an
hour, except without freeway exits or gas station stops. He still fishes
(muskies) and once went bone fishing with Carl Hiaasen, the famous novelist and
newspaper columnist from Florida, during which trip he learned that one should
not go bone-fishing in thunderstorms. He stopped hunting a few years ago, and
still likes to hang around the hunting camp during deer season, but doesn't
plan to kill any more deer.