Camp is the author of thirty-one published novels, all of which have appeared, in one format or another, on the New York Times Best-Seller lists. He is also the author of two non-fiction books, one on plastic surgery and one on art. His books have been translated into most European languages, as well as Japanese and Korean. He is the principal sponsor of a major archaeological dig in Israel, and is on the board of directors of the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research.

Camp was born February 23, 1944, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 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.

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, and is greatly missed.

After graduating from the University of Iowa in 1966, Camp spent two years in the U.S. Army, during which he served in Korea. He then worked as a reporter for the Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Southeast Missourian for a year, returning to University of Iowa in 1970 for his master's degree.

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.

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

In addition to archaeology, he is deeply interested in art (painting) and photography; he occasionally writes on-line articles on both. He enjoys reading history. He is interested in a number of outdoor sports, including hunting and 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, CA, and spent three months limping around and cursing horses. He is a golfer.

Until 2012 he lived in Lakeland Shores, east of Saint Paul, in Minnesota, spending the winters in Pasadena, California. He recently sold the Lakeland Shores home and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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.

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.

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. In January of 2008, he was embedded with a Blackhawk squadron in Iraq, which produced an eight-part series for MinnPost, and later that year he covered the Republican National Convention.

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. With the discovery of an industrial apiary at Rehov, it's now believed that the Biblical phrase may refer accurately to bee honey.

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.)

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 hunts (whitetail deer) and fishes (muskies) and once went bone fishing with Carl Hiaasen, the novelist and newspaper columnist from Florida, during which trip he learned that one should not go bone-fishing in thunderstorms.