John Sandford is the pseudonym of John Roswell Camp, anAmerican author and journalist. Camp won the Pulitzer Prize in journalism in1986 and was one of four finalists for the prize in 1980. He also was the winnerof the Distinguished Writing Award of the American Society of Newspaper Editorsfor 1985.
Camp is the author of fifty-four published novels, as of the summer of2022, all of which have appeared, in one format or another, on the New YorkTimes best-seller lists, many debuting at #1. In addition to the Prey, VirgilFlowers and Letty Davenport novels, all part of the Prey universe, he is alsothe co-author of three young-adult books in the Singular Menace series, written with Michele Cook,and co-author of the science-fiction thriller SaturnRun with Ctein.
He is the author of two non-fiction books, one on art (The Eye and the Heart: The Watercolors of John StuartIngle) and one on plastic surgery (Plastic Surgery:the Kindest Cut). His books have been translated into most European andMiddle Eastern languages, as well as Japanese and Korean.
He was the principal financial backer, a digger and for many yearsphotographer at the fifteen-year-long Beth-Shean Valley Archaeological Projectin the Jordan River Valley of Israel. The dig resulted in a classic five-volumereport on findings authored by dig director Amihai Mazar and assistant directorNava Panitz-Cohen, both of Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Camp was born February 23, 1944, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His maternalgrandparents were immigrants from Lithuania and he spent many of his early yearsliving on, or visiting, their rural acreage, with the traditional "three-holer,"subsistence gardens, a variety of farm animals and fruit trees, and haying inthe summers.
He attended Cedar Rapids Catholic and then public schools, graduating fromWashington Senior High School in 1962. He received a bachelor's degree inAmerican Studies in 1966, and a master's degree in journalism in 1971, both fromthe University of Iowa. Between his two stints at the University of Iowa, heserved two years in the U.S. Army in Korea with the 4th U.S. Army MissileCommand.
Camp was married to Susan Lee Jones in 1966, and has two children, RoswellCamp and Emily Curtis, and three grandchildren, Benjamin, Daniel and GabrielCurtis. His wife, Susan, died of metastasized breast cancer in May, 2007.
In October, 2013, he married Michele Cook, a journalist and screenwriter.They currently live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In addition to co-authoring thethree books in the Singular Menace series, Cook has done the initial editing ofall 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.) Afterhis release from the Army, he worked as a reporter for the Cape Girardeau,Missouri, Southeast Missourian for a year, covering such stories as the Cairo,Illinois, race riots.
He was a reporter and an editor at The Miami Herald from 1971-1978, and areporter and columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press from 1978-1990. Hecontinues to do occasional journalism and was embedded with the 2-147 AirAssault Battalion during the Iraq War and covered the 2008 Republican NationalConvention in St. Paul.
In addition to archaeology, he is deeply interested in art (painting) andphotography. He occasionally writes online articles on both. He enjoys readinghistory. 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 agolfer. He listens to a lot of Texas-based country music and thinks the worldwould 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 ofPrey and The Fool's Run, were going to be published only three months apart, bydifferent publishers, G.P. Putnam's Sons asked him to come up with a pseudonymfor Rules of Prey. The publisher felt the near-simultaneous release of twodifferent books, written in different styles, could create a marketing problem.Camp is a Civil War buff, and chose the name Sandford after his paternalgreat-grandfather, Henry Sandford, who fought with the Belle City Rifles, partof 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'sWorkshops at the University of Iowa, but only as minor elective courses. He alsowrote articles for The Daily Iowan, the university newspaper, but didn't getseriously involved in journalism until he was in the army. His most intensetraining in journalism came at the U.S. Army's Defense Information School atFort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. After graduation from that school, he became amilitary journalist in Korea, running a base newspaper for the 4th U.S. ArmyMissile Command in Chunchon, Korea. In an odd coincidence, the command'sinformation officer, Lt. Robert Keeler, who was the only other American involvedin the tiny paper, later worked for Newsday newspaper on Long Island, and alsowon a Pulitzer Prize.
What about the Pulitzer Prize and the journalism?
Camp was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, for aseries of stories on Native American culture, and in 1986 he won the Pulitzerfor Non-Deadline Feature Writing for a series of stories collectively titledLife on the Land: An American Farm Family.
The series, written during the Midwest farm crisis, followed a typicalsouthwest Minnesota farm family through the course of a full year. He stoppedwriting full-time for the Pioneer Press in 1989, although he didn't stop writingfor the paper entirely until the next year. In 1996 he wrote a ten-years-laterfollow-up to Life on the Land, and he's written occasional book reviews for theFort Worth Star Telegram. More recently, he's written for MinnPost.com, aMinnesota-centered online newspaper.
And how about the archaeology?
Camp has always been an avid reader of history — his bachelor'sdegree is in American studies, which was a combination of American history andliterature. He continued reading history through his career, American history atfirst, then going to modern European history, and finally, early history. Thatinevitably 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 ofArchaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Camp and Mazar got along welland began discussing the possibility of a large new excavation that wouldattempt to clarify Biblical chronology during the Iron Age.
The chronology was, and still is, a matter of some controversy, anddirectly deals with the question of the existence of, and extent of, the UnitedMonarchy of David and Solomon. The dig began in 1997, continued through 2012,and involved the work of hundreds of volunteer diggers, including Camp. Asidefrom much work on the chronology, the dig uncovered the only known commercialapiary (beehive complex) ever found from the period. Before the dig,archaeologists and historians believed that the Biblical phrase "The land ofmilk and honey" referred to date honey, rather than natural bee honey. With thediscovery of an industrial apiary at Rehov, it's now believed that the Biblicalphrase 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 ChippewaZoo, was a near-future low-tech science fiction novel. They were neverpublished by anyone, and they never will be. He also wrote an untitled ghostnovel in 1993, but after some discussion, it was not published, the feelingbeing that it was too much of a divergence at that early point in his thrillerwriting career. (Also, when he reviewed it much later, hoping to revive it, hedecided 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 seriouspainter and photographer; his photos have appeared in various newspapers,magazines, and on-line venues. He does not show his paintings. He has also had alife-long interest in various outdoor sports. In 1980, he solo-paddled a canoefrom Lake Itasca, the source of the Mississippi River in Northern Minnesota,through New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. Earlier that same year, hecross-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 everyFebruary in Hayward, Wisconsin.
He and a partner were the last winners of the Dan Jenkins' Goat Hills golftournament in Fort Worth, Texas, sponsored by the renowned Texas sportswriterand novelist. He quit SCUBA diving after going down to sixty feet in theCaribbean, then wondering why he was doing that. He quit sailing when herealized that it was much like driving across Kansas in an RV at eight miles anhour, except without freeway exits or gas station stops.
He still fishes (muskies) and once went bone fishing with his old friendCarl Hiaasen, the famous novelist and newspaper columnist from Florida, duringwhich trip he learned that one should not go bone-fishing in thunderstorms. Hestopped hunting a few years ago, and doesn't plan to kill any more deer.
