Background
Smith was born in Summit, New Jersey in 1965 and moved to Toledo, Ohio as a child.
Smith was born in Summit, New Jersey in 1965 and moved to Toledo, Ohio as a child.
Dartmouth College; Columbia University. Columbia University School of the Arts.
After graduating from Dartmouth College and from Columbia University with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing, he took up writing full-time. His second novel, The Ruins, was also adapted into a film, released on April 4, 2008. Stephen King called it "he best horror novel of the new century." King had also called A Simple Plan "simply the best suspense novel of the year." Smith is the son of Linda and Doug Smith.
He told The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reviewer Regis Behe that, as a child, he read his father"s "castoffs," the novels of Clive Cussler and Jack Higgins.
"Growing up, I also read Ray Bradbury and Stephen King," he said. "I just had a sense of how to create these places that aren"t real world places, but just with this provisional attachment to the real world.
lieutenant is very much of your imagination, and I felt very much I could do that.".