Author Profile

Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob was born August 6th, 1934 in Oxford, England. It was not necessary in England in 1934 to name a baby instantly; there was a grace period of a number of days. As the deadline loomed, his mother simply gave him all the names she could think of.

Piers became an American citizen while serving in the U. S. Army in 1958. After his stint in the Army he settled in Florida where he lives today (near the North Village) on his tree farm.

Piers had the hodgepodge of employments typical of writers. Of about fifteen types of work he tried, ranging from aide at a mental hospital to technical writer at an electronics company, only one truly appealed, the least successful, being a writer. But the dream remained. His first effort at writing was a story called "Evening" that was one of the top ten finalists in a winnerless contest by Galaxy Magazine.

Finally in 1962, when he was 28, Piers' wife Cam agreed to go to work for a year, so that he could stay home and try to write fiction full time. Cam eventually became a computer programmer. The agreement was that if he did not manage to sell anything, he would give up the dream and focus on supporting his family. As it happened, he sold two stories, earning $160. But such success seemed inadequate to earn a living. So Piers became an English teacher, didn't like that either, and in 1966 retired again to writing. This time he wrote novels instead of stories, and with them he was able to earn a modest living. He submitted his second novel, Chthon, and it finally sold as a novel in 1966 and was published in 1967. As with the rest of his life, progress was slow, but a decade later he got into light fantasy with the first of his ongoing Xanth series of novels, A Spell For Chameleon , and that proved to be the golden ring.

Piers was a contributor to a variety of fanzines during the 1960's and 1970's, before the publishers' demands for his fiction became so great that he had little time left for fanzine work. Very early in his career, he showed a tendency towards series novels that could also be enjoyed as stand-alone works. This approach proved most successful for him with his wildly successful Xanth series, and later with the Apprentice Adept and the Incarnations of Immortality series, all of which have been best-sellers. These series have regularly earned Piers a place on various national best-seller lists and have made him one of the top echelon of science fiction/fantasy writers in terms of both reader popularity and sales success.

His first Xanth novel, won the British August Derleth Fantasy award for 1977. His novel Ogre, Ogre may have been the first original fantasy paperback ever to make the New York Times bestseller list, and many of his fantasies since then have been bestsellers. Translations of Piers' novels have appeared in over ten different languages.

His sales and income soared, and he became one of the most successful writers of the genre, with twenty-one New York Times paperback bestsellers in the space of a decade. In one year alone three of his novels placed on The New York Times bestseller list. The Spokane Public Library gave him the Golden Pen Award for being their favorite fantasy author in 1982.

His autobiography to age 50, Bio of An Ogre , is now out of print. There is scheduled to be a sequel, How Precious Was That While, from TOR BOOKS in 2001. At that time he had had 50 books published, now it is well over 100.

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