John Jakes

• 1. Introduction

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  John William Jakes sold his first short story in 1950, and by the time he died in Sarasota on the 11th of March 2023, he had put tens of millions of books into readers' hands. The Kent Family Chronicles alone sold 55 million copies. The North and South trilogy sold another 10 million. Few American writers of the twentieth century moved that kind of volume, and fewer still did it while also writing science fiction, sword-and-sorcery tales, westerns, children's books, stage plays, and novelizations for film.

  How did a Chicago-born advertising copywriter who spent his nights grinding out pulp fiction become one of the defining voices of American historical storytelling? And what drove a man who wrote under multiple pen names, joined a secret guild of fantasy authors, and adapted Charles Dickens for the stage to keep returning, again and again, to the sweep of American history?

• 2. Chicago to the Pulps

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  Jakes was born in Chicago, Illinois, on the 31st of March 1932, and he did not wait long to begin selling his work. While still a college student in the early 1950s, he placed stories with pulp magazines, the cheap, high-volume fiction market that trained a generation of American genre writers.

  Those early placements were no accident. Thrilling Wonder Stories, edited by Sam Merwin, published two letters from Jakes dating to 1949-1950. Two of his stories then appeared in pulp magazines edited by Howard Browne late in 1950: "The Dreaming Trees" in Fantastic Adventures in November, and "Your Number Is Up!" in Amazing Stories in December. His first short story sold was 1,500 words. Twenty-eight more speculative fiction stories followed between 1951 and 1953.

  At DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, he studied creative writing and joined Sigma Alpha Epsilon, graduating in 1953. He then completed a master's degree in American literature at Ohio State University. On the 23rd of August 1952, he and his wife Rachel, married just thirteen months at the time, appeared on the television game show Beat the Clock. They failed the Bonus Round, but Rachel won a Sylvania "Jefferson" twenty-inch television set. It is the kind of domestic detail that sits oddly beside a career in sweeping historical fiction, but it is a reminder that Jakes was building an ordinary life while building a writing life at the same time.

• 3. The Advertising Years

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  In 1961, Jakes moved to Dayton, Ohio, and spent the next decade working as a copywriter for several advertising agencies. Fiction came after hours, written at night and on weekends while the day job paid the bills. In 1971, he began to write full-time.

  Those years in advertising were not wasted. The discipline of writing to a brief, for an audience, on deadline, left a visible mark on Jakes's output. During the two decades following his graduation from college, he published dozens of stories and several novels spanning fantasy, science fiction, westerns, and other kinds of historical fiction. He was covering ground across multiple genres while most writers of his era were staking out a single territory. The pen name Jay Scotland appeared on some of that work, a sign that different genres sometimes called for different identities.

• 4. SAGA and Sword and Sorcery

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  Among the speculative fiction output of those years, Jakes produced a series of stories centered on a character called Brak the Barbarian. That work brought him into the orbit of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, known as SAGA. The organization was a loose-knit group of heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s and led by Lin Carter. Its eight original members were self-selected on the basis of fantasy credentials alone.

  SAGA's purpose was direct: to promote the popularity and respectability of the sword-and-sorcery subgenre. The Brak the Barbarian stories qualified Jakes as one of the founding eight. The first Brak the Barbarian novel appeared in 1968, and the series extended across multiple volumes through 1980, with two omnibus editions following in 2012. That Jakes sustained a sword-and-sorcery franchise across more than a decade, while simultaneously developing as a writer of American historical fiction, says something about the range he carried into his most commercially successful period.

• 5. The Bicentennial Millions

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  The Kent Family Chronicles gave Jakes his first mass audience. The series launched with The Bastard in 1974 and ran through The Americans in 1979, eight novels in total covering the sweep of American history from colonial times forward. The timing was deliberate: the series arrived as the United States was moving through its Bicentennial celebration, and it became the defining bestselling fiction of that moment. The eight books sold 55 million copies.

  Television followed. The Bastard was adapted as a miniseries by Universal Television and became the first offering of Operation Prime Time, a syndicated package that went on to substantial success. The Rebels and The Seekers both followed as adaptations in 1979. The sequence demonstrated that Jakes's readers were not only buying books; they were also turning out for screen versions of the same stories.

  The North and South trilogy arrived next, beginning with North and South in 1982, followed by Love and War in 1984, and Heaven and Hell in 1987. The three books, centered on the Civil War, sold 10 million copies and were adapted as three miniseries on ABC across the 1980s and 1990s. In September 2013, the state of Florida named Jakes a Literary Legend at the Florida Heritage Book Festival and Writers Conference in St. Augustine.

• 6. Stage, Family, Legacy

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  In 1988, Jakes wrote a stage adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, first performed at his home theater on Hilton Head Island. The production found an afterlife well beyond that premiere. Universities and regional theaters took it up, including the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and it went on being performed decades after its debut.

  Jakes lived on Bird Key in Sarasota, Florida, with his wife Rachel, to whom he had been married since 1951. They had four grown children: Andrea, Dr. Ellen, J. Michael, and Victoria. The Crown Family Saga, a third major historical series, produced Homeland in 1993 and American Dreams in 1998, continuing his long engagement with American history into a new generation of characters.

  He died in Sarasota on the 11th of March 2023, at the age of 90. The Brak the Barbarian omnibus editions of 2012 suggest that even the sword-and-sorcery work from his earliest career had readers who wanted it back in print.