Background
John Jakes was born on March 31, 1932, in Chicago, Illinois, United States, to the family of a Railway Express general manager John Adrian Jakes and Bertha Jakes.
John Jakes was born on March 31, 1932, in Chicago, Illinois, United States, to the family of a Railway Express general manager John Adrian Jakes and Bertha Jakes.
While studying in high school, John Jakes was involved in theatre activity and acting. However, when he became a university student, his interest changed to writing. Already during the first year at Northwestern University, Jakes began creating stories professionally. At the age of eighteen, he managed to sell his first story for $25. "That check changed the whole direction of my life," says Jakes.
John Jakes published his first work while he was still a high school student. However, nonetheless, he was constantly writing, his first jobs were connected with advertising. In 1954 he started to work for Abbott Laboratories as a copywriter and a product promotion manager. After six years there, he changed the place and for a year was a copywriter at Rumrill Co. Holding down full-time positions in the advertising industry, Jakes turned out more than fifty books in various genres, including science-fiction, mystery, children's literature, and suspense. There was even a period from 1961 to 1965 when John dedicated himself to freelance writing.
Unfortunately, Jakes's early work brought him little recognition and only a modest secondary income. That was the reason to continue working for advertising. In 1965 he became a senior copywriter at Kircher Helton & Collet. In three years he was appointed to the position of Copy chief and Vice President at Oppenheim, Herminghausen, Clarke Incorporation. After that in 1970, Jakes became Creative Director at Dancer-Fitzgerald-Sample.
Continuing to write, John felt he had bottomed out as a writer in 1973 when he accepted an assignment to write a novelization of the last film in the Planet of the Apes movie series. He remembers the job - which took him three weeks and earned him a quick fifteen hundred dollars - with bitterness. "When that Planet of the Apes thing came along, I said to my wife, ‘I've been wasting the last twenty years.’" He had doubts about his ability as a writer, but fortunately for Jakes his fellow writer Don Moffitt had a higher opinion of his work.
Thanks to Moffitt, Jakes got the opportunity to create a series of historical novels for publication around the time of the bicentennial of the United States. The books would follow several generations of the fictional Kent family through the first hundred years of the country's history.
The series was originally intended to total five books, but its success was so great that the publisher was eager to extend Jakes's contract. Eight titles were eventually published, beginning with The Bastard in 1974 and concluding with The Americans in 1980. None of the titles sold less than 3.5 million copies, and the series as a whole has sold over fifty million copies. Marked by vivid plots and memorable, simply drawn characters, the saga takes readers through seven generations of the Kent family history. The publisher would have continued the series for as long as it remained profitable, but after The Americans, Jakes rebelled.
Following his triumph in the realm of paperback publishing, Jakes was approached by Harcourt Brace to produce a trio of hardcover novels covering the Civil War era. The North and South trilogy - North and South, Love and War, and Heaven and Hell - intertwine fictional and real-life characters much as the American Bicentennial series does, and has proved to be as successful.
In 1989 Jakes published California Gold, and 1993 saw the publication of Homeland, the first of a new cycle of novels about a fictional family in the twentieth century. Homeland was named by the New York Times as one of its "notable books of 1993." The Crown family saga continues in American Dreams.
Jakes marked his fiftieth year as a writer with the publication of On Secret Service. This novel explores a little-regarded aspect of the American Civil War: the development of the United States Secret Service and its role following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
As a lifelong admirer of the life and work of Charles Dickens, Jakes created a stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol in the late 80's. Since then the script has been widely produced by university and regional theaters, including the prestigious Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the Victory Theater of Dayton, and the Burt Reynolds Institute for Theater Training in West Palm Beach.
Jakes is also editor of the collection A Century of Great Western Stories, an anthology of thirty short stories written over the previous century by such masters of the genre as Zane Grey, Owen Wister, Max Brand, and Luke Short. Above all, he has become a research fellow at the University of South Carolina and a trustee at DePauw University.
John Jakes's commitment to historical accuracy and evocative storytelling earned him the title of "the godfather of historical novelists" from the Los Angeles Times and led to a streak of sixteen consecutive New York Times bestsellers.
Jakes has won the hearts of a worldwide audience. More than 55 million copies of the Kent Chronicles are currently in print, along with nearly 10 million copies of The North and South Trilogy. Besides, six of his major novels have been filmed as television mini-series. The first North and South production stands at 7th position among the 10 highest-rated miniseries of all time.
(In these timeless stories of the untamed American West, t...)
2012(A courtesan for hire, a brainless hunk, and alien invader...)
1972(Two families are united - and torn apart - by the Civil W...)
1982(The first in a saga about a German immigrant and his fami...)
1993
Quotations:
"I thought that to be a legend meant you had to be dead."
"Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.”
"What I always tell writers' groups is, if you cash the check, you don't have a lot of say. It's a whole different medium. It's a committee. It's bad enough with an editor and publisher looking over your shoulder, but when you have these committees that tell a screenwriter how to rewrite, what to put in...there are a couple of things in the 'North and South' pictures that were just dismal, but they were invented not by me but by the producer. Well, I made the money off it; I still do."
"Human beings may be inconsistent, but human nature is true to itself."
"Spend as much time as you can with your mouth shut and your eyes and ears open."
John Jakes is a meticulous person. When he started his first historical saga, Jakes said: "I really didn’t see how anyone who wasn’t a trained historian could accomplish it, especially within the deadlines I was given." Each book of more than 500 pages required then about four months of poring through biographies and historical diaries followed by an equal period of non-stopping writing.
Nonetheless, Jakes is a rich writer, he continues to be modest. He works in a small, makeshift office in the basement of his home using a typewriter that he bought secondhand for 35 dollars in 1955.
Quotes from others about the person
Doug Grad, Jakes's editor at Dutton between 1998 and 2004: "It wasn't just that John was a great researcher and a terrific writer but a true professional. With other authors I had to make plot suggestions, untangle dialog. With John there was none of that. Instead of devoting my time to editing, we could devote it to marketing and publicity."
Patricia Cornwell: "The best historical novelist of our time."
Early Bird Books on The North and South Trilogy: "If historical fiction is your go-to genre, you can’t go wrong with Jakes’ epic trilogy."
Swimming, boating, acting and directing in community theater
Charles Dickens, Zola, Balzac, Scott Fitzgerald, Georges Simenon, Dumas, Tolstoy, Kenneth Roberts, Hervey Allen, Thomas Costain, Samuel Shellabarger, John D. MacDonald, Larry McMurtry, John Irving, Robert B. Parker, Sandra Brown, Patricia Cornwell, Ken Follett, Evan Hunter
On June 15, 1951, Jakes married Rachel Ann Payne. They had 4 children: Andrea, Ellen, John Michael, and Victoria.
