Douglas Preston (born May 26, 1956 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) is an author of seventeen popular techno-thriller and horror novels, four alone and the rest with Lincoln Child. He also has authored several non-fiction books, both alone and one with Italian author Mario Spezi.
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Biography
A graduate of the Cambridge School of Weston in Weston, Massachusetts, and Pomona College in Claremont, California, Preston began his writing career at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In addition to his collaborations with Child, he has written several novels and non-fiction books of his own, mainly dealing with the history of the American Southwest. He is a contributing writer for Smithsonian, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker magazines. He has two brothers: David Preston (a medical doctor) and Richard Preston, also a best-selling fiction/non-fiction author.
Most of Preston's five nonfiction books and thirteen novel were bestsellers and have been translated into many languages. With his frequent collaborator, Lincoln Child, he has co-authored such bestselling thrillers as The Cabinet of Curiosities, The Ice Limit, Thunderhead, Riptide, Brimstone and Relic. Their novel, The Book of the Dead, which came out in June 2006, was on the New York Times bestseller list for six weeks. Preston writes about archeology for the New Yorker magazine and he has also been published in Smithsonian magazine, Harper's, and National Geographic. He is the recipient of numerous writing awards. He has created the character Wyman Ford, an ex-CIA agent who appears in many of his solo novels.
From 1978 to 1985, Preston worked for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City as a writer, editor, and manager of publications. He served as Managing Editor for the journal Curator and was a columnist for Natural History magazine. In 1985 he published a history of the museum, Dinosaurs In The Attic: An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History, which chronicled the explorers and expeditions of the museum's early days.
In 1986 Preston moved to New Mexico and began to write full-time. Seeking an understanding of the first moment of contact between Europeans and Indians in America, he retraced on horseback Francisco Vasquez de Coronado's violent and unsuccessful search for the legendary Seven Cities of Gold. That thousand mile journey across the American Southwest resulted in the book Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest. Since that time Preston has undertaken many long horseback journeys retracing historic or prehistoric trails. He has also participated in expeditions in other parts of the world, including a journey deep into Khmer Rouge-held territory in the Cambodian jungle with a small army of soldiers, to be the first Westerner to visit a lost Angkor temple. He once had the thrill of being the first person in 3,000 years to enter an ancient Egyptian burial chamber in a tomb known as KV5 in the Valley of the Kings.
Preston counts in his ancestry the poet Emily Dickinson, the newspaperman Horace Greeley, and the infamous murderer and opium addict Amasa Greenough. He and his wife, Christine, live in Maine with their three children.
Solo works
Fiction
- Jennie (1994)
- The Codex (2004)
- Tyrannosaur Canyon (2005)
- Blasphemy (2008)
- Impact (2010)
Non-fiction
- 1986 Dinosaurs In The Attic: An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History
- 1988 Death Trap Defies Treasure Seekers for Two Centuries[1]
- 1992 Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest in Pursuit of Coronado[2]
- 1996 Talking to the Ground: One Family's Journey on Horseback Across the Sacred Land of the Navajo
Novels with Lincoln Child
The Pendergast novels
- Relic (1995)
- Reliquary (1997)
- The Cabinet of Curiosities (2002)
- Still Life with Crows (2003)
- Diogenes Trilogy
- Brimstone (2004)
- Dance of Death (2005)
- The Book of the Dead (2006)
- The Wheel of Darkness (2007)
- Cemetery Dance (2009)
- Fever Dream (2010)
Other novels
- Mount Dragon (1996)
- Riptide (1998)
- Thunderhead (1999)
- The Ice Limit (2000)
Works with Mario Spezi
Non-fiction
- The Monster of Florence (2008)
See also
References
- ^ Death Trap Defies Treasure Seekers for Two Centuries; Douglas Preston, Smithsonian Magazine, June 1988.
- ^ Douglas Preston (1992). Cities of Gold: A journey across the American southwest in pursuit of Coronado. Simon and Schuster. pp. 480. ISBN 0617737597.
External links
- The Official Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child website
- Interview with Douglas Preston on BookBanter
- Interview with Douglas Preston on Class-B.net
- Interview with Douglas Preston on Crimecritics.com
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