John Jakes was an American author, known for historical and speculative fiction. John William Jakes was born March 31, 1932, in Chicago. Jakes studied creative writing at DePauw University in Indiana and started his career by selling stories to pulp magazines. He married his wife Rachel in 1951, and in 1952, they appeared together on the game show Beat the Clock. John graduated from DePauw in 1953 and went on to earn an MA in American Literature from Ohio State University. They moved to Dayton, Ohio in 1961, where Jakes worked as a copywriter for several advertising agencies. Over those ten years, he wrote fiction at night and on the weekends, and in 1971, John began writing full-time. Over the course of his career, he wrote under a few pseudonyms, the two most famous being the names Jay Scotland and J.X. Williams. The Jakes moved to Florida in the 70s and had four children. John Jakes died in Sarasota on March 11, 2023, at the age of 90.

While at DePauw University John Jakes published speculative fiction stories and in the twenty years after graduating college, he published dozens of stories and several novels, most of which were fantasy fiction, science fiction and westerns, as well as historical fiction. Jakes was a member of the Swordsman and Sorcerers’ Guild of America, a group of heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s. They helped to promote the “Sword and Sorcery” subgenre, which Jakes published the stories within. John’s popularity skyrocketed with the publication of his , which was a bestselling American Bicentennial series of books in the mid to late 70s. He continued to publish more popular works of historical fiction, most dealing with American History. The most famous of which was his North and South trilogy about the U.S. Civil War, which was later adapted into an ABC miniseries. John also ventured into writing stage adaptations, and his adaptation of Charles Dickens’s was first performed in Hilton Head and has since become a popular production for university and regional theaters.