Background

Stephen Hunter was born on March 25, 1946, in Kansas City, Missouri, United States. His father was Charles Francis Hunter, a Northwestern University speech professor who was killed in 1975. His mother was Virginia Ricker Hunter, a writer of children's books.

Education

Hunter graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1968.

Career

After graduating from Northwestern in 1968 with a degree in journalism, Hunter was drafted for two years into the United States Army serving in The Old Guard (3rd Infantry Regiment) in Washington, D.C., a unit that has both operational and ceremonial missions, the latter most notably being the guard force for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He also wrote for a military paper, the Pentagon News.

He joined The Baltimore Sun in 1971, working at the copy desk of the newspaper's Sunday edition for a decade. He became its film critic in 1982, a post he held until moving to The Washington Post in the same function in 1997.

Hunter's thriller novels include Point of Impact (filmed as Shooter), Black Light and Time to Hunt, which form a trilogy featuring Vietnam War veteran and sniper Bob "the Nailer" Swagger. The story of Bob Lee Swagger continued with The 47th Samurai (2007), Night of Thunder (2008), I, Sniper (2009), Dead Zero (2010), The Third Bullet (2013), Sniper's Honor (2014) and G-Man (2017). The series has led to two spin-off series: Hot Springs, Pale Horse Coming, and Havana form another trilogy centered on Bob Swagger's father, Earl Swagger, while Soft Target (2011) focuses on Bob's long-unknown son, Ray Cruz.

Hunter has written three non-fiction books: Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem (1995), a collection of essays from his time at The Sun; American Gunfight (2005), an examination of the November 1, 1950 assassination attempt on Harry S. Truman at Blair House in Washington, D.C.; and Now Playing at the Valencia (2005), a collection of pieces from The Washington Post. Hunter has also written a number of non-film-related articles for The Post, including one on Afghanistan: "Dressed To Kill - From Kabul to Kandahar, It's Not Who You Are That Matters, but What You Shoot" (2001).

Some of his recent works include Dead Zero (2010), The Third Bullet (2013) and Sniper's Honor (2014).

He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Achievements

• Stephen Hunter is famous for his novels featuring both Bob Lee Swagger and Earl Swagger, and the apparent new hero Ray Cruz. One of Hunter’s books, Point of Impact, was made into the movie “Shooter”. Hunter was has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize many times, and has been a finalist a couple of times: in 1995 and in 1996. He finally won the prize in 2003. Hunter also won the prestigious the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) Distinguished Writing Award in the criticism category in 1998.

Works

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  • Night of Thunder

    (Forced off the road and into a crash that leaves her in a...)

    2008
  • The Day Before Midnight

    (The countdown begins when welder Jack Hummel is abducted ...)

    1989
  • The 47th Samurai

    (In The 47th Samurai, Bob Lee Swagger, the gritty hero of ...)

    2007
  • Soft Target

    (Another action-packed thriller from Stephen Hunter, this ...)

    2011
  • Sniper's Honor

    (Ludmilla “Mili” Petrova was once the most hunted woman on...)

    2014
  • The Third Bullet

    (Ex-Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger follows the smallest hin...)

    2013
  • Pale Horse Coming

    (Pale Horse Coming, featuring Stephen Hunter’s beloved sni...)

    2001
  • Dead Zero

    (A marine sniper team on a mission in tribal territories o...)

    2010
  • Tapestry of Spies

    (Stephen Hunter has chosen the backdrop of the chaotic and...)

    2010
  • Dirty White Boys

    (They busted out of McAlester State Penitentiary - three e...)

  • The Master Sniper

    (In the death throes of World War II, one man is still at ...)

    1980
  • Havana

    (Havana, the sultry spring of 1953: gambling is expensive,...)

    2003
  • G-Man

    (Ryan Philippe currently stars as Bob Lee Swagger on the h...)

    2017
  • Black Light

    (Only one thing stands between a son and his father's kill...)

    1996
  • I, Sniper

    (Four famed ‘60s radicals are gunned down at long range by...)

    2009
  • Game of Snipers

    (Bob Lee Swagger takes on his biggest job to date... and c...)

    2019
  • Point of Impact

    (He was one the best Marine snipers in Vietnam. Today, twe...)

    1993
  • Time to Hunt

    (He is the most dangerous man alive.  He only wants to liv...)

    1998
  • Hot Springs

    (Earl Swagger is tough as hell. But even tough guys have t...)

    2000
  • The Second Saladin

    (A second chance... In the windswept sands of the Middle E...)

    1982

Views

As a successful novelist and former book editor, Stephen Hunter has a special understanding of the mechanics of storytelling. As a film critic, he established himself in Baltimore and then Washington as an irreverent, fearless, spontaneous, explosively funny voice. And he is forever suggesting that art can be a good, lusty, happy thing, that doesn't always have to be an immersion in a new level of human misery. As he often tells his readers, he thinks going to the movies is often a guilty pleasure. Indeed, the words he wrote of Anthony Quinn and Zorba might apply to Mr. Hunter and film criticism: one of those rare, perfect unions of a man and part-energetic, unperturbable, loud, attractive, graceful, earthy.

Quotations: “My theory of the world is that nothing works the way it’s supposed to work, so if anyone argues for perfection, they’re barking up the wrong tree. I wanted my Kennedy assassination conspiracy to be small and adept, but at the same time, mistakes were made, improvisations were made, the whole thing is thrown together on the fly and everybody happens to have a very good day on that day. To me, that was far more realistic than a theory that involves the CIA, Czechoslovakian intelligence and the Mattel toy company and their headquarters is under a volcano. You just don’t believe that.”

Personality

Hunter is a firearms enthusiast, well known in the gun community for firearm detail in many of his works of fiction. His knowledge of guns is encyclopedic and the details show up in his novels. Guns often give him a germ of an idea for a story. He himself shoots as a hobby, saying "many people don't understand, shooting a firearm is a sensual pleasure that's rewarding in and of itself."

Interests

• firearms

• Writers

  Ernest Hemingway

Connections

Father:

Charles Francis Hunter

Mother:

Virginia Ricker Hunter

References

• The Unofficial Stephen Hunter Website