James Patterson

Writer

• Born: March 22, 1947
• Place of Birth: Newburgh, NY

Biography

James Patterson was born in 1947 and was raised in Newburgh, New York. He attended Manhattan College, graduating summa cum laude with a BA in English, before completing his education at Vanderbilt University, where he obtained his MA. He began a career in advertising with the J. Walter Thompson Agency in 1971, creating campaigns for Kodak, Burger King, Toys’R’Us and may others, and eventually rose through the ranks to served as company chairperson from 1990 to 1996. He wrote a nonfictional account of his profession in collaboration with a colleague. He eventually settled in Palm Beach, Florida, with his wife and son.

Patterson’s first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar award, and he followed it with a sequence of thrillers exploring various aspects of the genre. Season of the Machete is a relatively conventional account of psychopathic murderers. The Jericho Commandment—reprinted as See How They Run when the author had established a successful series of nursery-rhyme-derived titles—is a revenge thriller whose climax is set at the Olympic Games. Virgin, reprinted as Cradle and All, is a religious thriller featuring virgin births and a threatened apocalypse. Black Market, reprinted as Black Friday, features dirty financial dealings. The Midnight Club returned to the territory of the psychopath thriller, which then became something of a specialism, providing the core of Patterson’s subsequent work in the long-running and best-selling Alex Cross series, featuring a police detective based in Washington, DC, who is an expert in abnormal and forensic psychology.

The first Alex Cross novel, Along Came a Spider, involves the hero with kidnapped schoolchildren. Kiss the Girls deals with more conventionally lurid sex crimes (and was made into a very effective movie). Jack and Jill has a political subtext, revolving around the murder of a senator. Cat and Mouse features a Ripperesque serial killer who moves across the Atlantic in the course of laying his trail of messy destruction. In Pop! Goes the Weasel intelligence agents play a deadly game. Roses are Red features a hijacked tour bus. Violets Are Blue is set against the backcloth of Goth/vampire subculture. The killer in Four Blind Mice targets army wives killed. The Big Bad Wolf features the seemingly-impossible murder of a Mafia godfather. London Bridges teams up villains from two earlier works—the Wolf and the Weasel—in an attempt to wipe out the town of Sunrise, Nevada. As in the similarly inclined works of Dean Koontz, the elements of faux-naïf grotesquerie signaled by the nursery-rhyme titles came increasingly to the fire as the series progressed.

Patterson branched out into domestic drama in such works as Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas and Sam’s Letters to Jennifer, and into “beach novels” in such works as The Beach House (with Peter de Jonge) and The Lifeguard (with Andrew Gross). Honeymoon (with Howard Roughan) is a Hitchcockesque thriller, while When the Wind Blows and The Lake House are technothrillers featuring flying children—a motif further exploited in the children’s novel Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment. SantaKid is a picture book for younger children. Although the collaborative items are presumably sharecropping exercises, these titles testify to the considerable range, consistent ingenuity and unfailing commercial acumen of Patterson’s writing.

Patterson's output is prolific; so much so that after 1996, he cowrote the majority of books. He sits down with a cowriter and creates a detailed outline with the cowriter, who then produces a first draft that they revise together. Among Patterson's most popular books are the Alex Cross and Michael Bennet detective series and the Women's Murder Club series. Aside from detective stories, he has also produced thrillers, science fiction, and romance works as well as works for young adults and children. As of January 2016, he had sold 350 million books worldwide and held the Guinness Record for the most books on the New York Times bestseller list. He handles his own advertising and has several Hachette employees devoted to managing his brand. In May 2015 he launched his own children's imprint at Hachette, called JIMMY Patterson.

Patterson is known as a publishing phenomenon, but also for his charitable work and dedication to children's literacy. He set up the website ReadKiddoRead.com to help parents in selecting books for their children. In 2015 he donated $1.75 million to US public schools and another $1 million to support independent bookstores. He was given the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

In 2022, Patterson garnered media attention for commenting that it was difficult for older White males to find work as writers or in the media industry. In the interview, Patterson alleged that the perceived difficulties were a form of racism. He later apologized for his remarks. In 2023, Patterson's Maximum Ride series was banned from two elementary schools in Florida.

Bibliography

"Biography." James Patterson: Official Website. Hachette, 2016. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.

"James Patterson." Bio. A&E Television Networks, 2016. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.

Levenson, Michael. "James Patterson Apologizes for Saying White Writers Face a 'Form of Racism.'" The New York Times, 14 June 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/books/james-patterson-discrimination-white-men.html. Accessed 28 Sept. 2024.

Mahler, Jonathan. "James Patterson Inc." New York Times Magazine. New York Times, 20 Jan. 2010. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.