George R. R. Martin

• 1. Introduction

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  George Raymond Richard Martin was born on the 20th of September, 1948, in Bayonne, New Jersey, the son of a longshoreman. Every day walking to school, he passed the dock and house that had once belonged to his family before the Great Depression stripped them of everything. That daily reminder of lost wealth, combined with a childhood world that stretched only from First Street to Fifth Street, gave Martin a hunger that books alone could satisfy. He became a voracious reader because he could not travel any other way.

  Before he turned ten, he was selling monster stories to neighborhood children for pennies, dramatic readings included, until a customer's mother complained about her child's nightmares. His pet turtles, dying frequently in their toy castle, became characters in stories of sinister plots and palace intrigue. The boy who could not leave his block invented worlds instead. What made those early obsessions grow into one of the most sprawling literary universes in modern fiction? How did a kid from a federal housing project near the Bayonne docks end up writing the book that Hollywood turned into a television phenomenon watched by tens of millions? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Making of a Writer

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  Stan Lee loomed larger for Martin than Shakespeare or Tolkien. He said so plainly: "Maybe Stan Lee is the greatest literary influence on me, even more than Shakespeare or Tolkien." A letter Martin wrote to the editor of Fantastic Four was printed in issue #20, in November 1963, and readers who spotted it wrote back. Through those exchanges, Martin found his way into the comics fandom community forming across the country, writing fiction for fanzines and buying what he would later describe as the first ticket to the world's first Comic-Con, held in New York in 1964.

  By 1965, he had won comic fandom's Alley Award for Best Fan Fiction for his prose superhero story "Powerman vs. The Blue Barrier". Five years later, he graduated summa cum laude from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism with a B.S. in journalism, followed by an M.S. from the same school in 1971. He objected to the Vietnam War and obtained conscientious objector status, spending two years from 1972 to 1974 as a VISTA volunteer attached to the Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation.

  His first professional sale, a story called "The Hero", went to Galaxy magazine and appeared in its February 1971 issue. The money from those early sales was not enough to pay his bills, which might have ended everything. What saved him was an unlikely intervention: Bobby Fischer's victory in the 1972 world chess championship set off an American chess craze, and Martin's own chess skills got him hired as a tournament director for the Continental Chess Association. Running tournaments on Saturdays and Sundays left five full weekdays for writing, from 1973 to 1976, long enough for him to become established before the chess craze subsided.

• 3. Teaching, Loss, and the Turn West

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  At a science fiction convention in Milwaukee in the mid-1970s, Martin met an English professor named George Guthridge from Dubuque, Iowa, who at the time despised science fiction and fantasy. Martin not only persuaded Guthridge to give the field a second look but talked him into writing in it himself. Guthridge went on to become a finalist for the Hugo Award and twice for the Nebula Award; in 1998, he and Janet Berliner won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in the Novel for their book Children of the Dusk.

  The debt ran both ways. Guthridge helped Martin land a job at what was then Clarke College. From 1976 to 1978, Martin taught English and journalism there, then served as Writer in Residence from 1978 to 1979. The sudden death of friend and fellow author Tom Reamy in late 1977 made Martin reconsider what he was doing with his life. He resigned his position in 1979 and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he would live alone for nearly three years, a period he described as tremendously productive.

  He had actually fallen in love with Santa Fe the year before, passing through on the way to the 36th World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix. His first wife, Gale Burnick, went ahead to buy a house. But their marriage ended in divorce in 1979 before they could be reunited there. Martin settled in Santa Fe alone from December of that year.

• 4. Hollywood and the Wilderness Years

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  The commercial failure of The Armageddon Rag in 1983 hit Martin hard. He later said it "essentially destroyed my career as a novelist at the time" and left him considering a move into real estate instead. What pulled him back was a phone call from Betsy Mitchell, the new editor at Baen Books, asking whether he had considered collecting his Haviland Tuf adventures. The Tuf Voyaging collection that resulted sold well enough that Martin's financial situation stabilized, just as a Hollywood producer named Philip DeGuere Jr. reached out about adapting The Armageddon Rag. That film never happened, but the relationship led directly to a job writing for the revival of The Twilight Zone.

  Television paid far better than fiction, so Martin moved to Hollywood. He progressed from staff writer to executive story consultant on The Twilight Zone, then moved to the satirical science fiction series Max Headroom, where he created the show's "Ped Xing" character. That show was cancelled mid-run. He then joined the dramatic fantasy series Beauty and the Beast, eventually becoming co-supervising producer in 1989 and writing 14 of its episodes.

  His 1980 novella Nightflyers illustrated both the appeal and the pain of adaptation. Vista purchased the screen rights in 1984 and produced a film in 1987, for which Martin co-wrote the screenplay. He was unhappy about having to cut plot elements to fit a small budget. Yet Martin has said he believes the film saved his career, and that everything he wrote afterward exists in part because of it. That paradox, the compromise that preserved the career that would eventually resist compromise, stayed with him through his Hollywood years.

• 5. A Song of Ice and Fire

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  In 1991, frustrated that television budgets kept forcing him to cut characters and trim battle scenes, Martin returned to novels. He wanted to write something vast enough that no budget could constrain it. A Song of Ice and Fire took its initial inspiration from the Wars of the Roses, the novel The Accursed Kings, and Ivanhoe. Martin originally conceived the series as three volumes; it is now planned to reach seven.

  The first book, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996. The fifth, A Dance with Dragons, published on the 12th of July, 2011, became an international bestseller and remained on the New York Times Bestseller List for 88 weeks. In November 2005, the fourth novel, A Feast for Crows, reached the top spot on the New York Times list. A Dance with Dragons won the Locus Poll Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 2012 and made the final ballot for the Hugo Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the British Fantasy Award that same year.

  In 2005, Lev Grossman of Time called Martin "the American Tolkien", and in 2011, he appeared on the annual Time 100 list. Martin accepts the Tolkien comparison as a compliment but also sees it as a challenge. He has described what he calls "Disneyland Middle Ages" fantasy, which glosses over the brutal realities of feudal social structures, as something his own work deliberately refuses. He has said of Tolkien's premise that a good king makes the land prosper: "We look at real history and it's not that simple. Just having good intentions doesn't make you a wise king."

  Scholar Adam Roberts has credited Martin with the rise of grimdark fantasy as a subgenre. Canadian fantasy writer R. Scott Bakker has said he would not have been able to publish his novels without the commercial ground Martin broke first.

• 6. From Page to Screen

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  HBO purchased the television rights to A Song of Ice and Fire in 2007. Martin was involved from the start, helping select the production team and writing scripts; he is listed as co-executive producer in the opening credits. The original pilot was shot between the 24th of October and the 19th of November, 2009, in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Morocco. HBO executives received it so poorly that they delayed making any decision for four months. In March 2010, the greenlight came, and HBO ordered the first episode reshot, scrapping all the Morocco footage.

  The series premiered in the United States and Canada on the 17th of April, 2011, seen initially by 2.2 million viewers. By the fourth season, Game of Thrones had become the most-watched series in HBO history, averaging 18.4 million viewers across multiple platforms and surpassing the previous record held by The Sopranos. The fifth season set a Guinness World Record by winning 12 Emmy Awards in a single season and year. The eighth and final season received 32 nominations at the 71st Primetime Emmy Awards, the most ever for a single season of television, and won twelve.

  Martin wrote one episode per season through the fourth season, including the "Blackwater" episode in season two. He later said he became estranged from the show during the production of the last four seasons, stepping back to focus on The Winds of Winter, the sixth novel in the series, which remains unpublished. The prequel series House of the Dragon premiered on the 21st of August, 2022, based on his novel Fire & Blood, set roughly 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones. Five days after its premiere, HBO renewed it for a second season.

• 7. Santa Fe, Philanthropy, and Later Life

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  Martin has been a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, for decades, and the city declared the 29th of March as George R. R. Martin Day. He married his longtime partner Parris McBride on the 15th of February, 2011, in a small ceremony at their Santa Fe home; on the 19th of August, 2011, they held a larger ceremony at Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention.

  In early 2013, Martin purchased Santa Fe's Jean Cocteau Cinema and Coffee House, which had been closed since 2006. He had it fully restored, including its original 35mm projection capability, adding digital projection and sound; the Cocteau reopened on the 9th of August, 2013. In 2019, he opened a bookstore called Beastly Books next door, named after Beauty and the Beast. He pledged $2.7 million toward a new Meow Wolf art space in January 2015. A 2014 fundraising campaign for the Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary and the Food Depot of Santa Fe raised a total of $502,549; donors giving $20,000 or more were offered the chance to have a character named after them and killed off in an upcoming novel.

  In February 2025, Martin was invited to meet three dire wolves created by the biotech company Colossal Biosciences, of which he is a cultural advisor. He described the experience by saying: "Maybe I was remembering a past life, when I ran with a pack in the Ice Age.... Whatever the reason, I have to say the rebirth of the direwolf has stirred me as no scientific news has since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon." The boy who once wrote pet-turtle death plots in Bayonne lived to see the animals from his most famous pages walking in the real world.