Skolarbete

Robert Jordan, a pseudonym for James Oliver Rigney Jr., was born in Charleston South Carolina in 1948, where he still lives with his wife Harriet in a house built in 1797.
During his young years, starting from the age of four, his twelve-year-older brother read books to entertain James while he was baby-sitting him. They worked through a lot of books, but not children books as one would presume, but books written by great authors such as Jules Verne, H G. Wells and Mark Twain. As time passed, the same brother strongly encouraged “Robert” to learn the art of reading, and by the age of five he was tackling Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

Jordan served two tours in Vietnam, from where he got the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze “V,” and two Vietnamese Crosses of Gallantry. He later went on to enter and graduate from The Citadel, a Military College of South Carolina, with a degree in physics. He then became a nuclear engineer for the navy.

During a hospital stay, he had time to catch up on reading and concluded that he could write as well as any of the authors of whom he had read. 1977 he started his new career and thirteen years later, he is one of the most known- and read authors having given us nine volumes of the “Wheel of Time” series as well as seven books of the “Conan” series. He has also written the historical fiction series “Fallon” using the pseudonym Reagan O’Neal, the western story “Cheyenne Raiders” under pseudonym Jackson O’Reilly and several different books, articles and columns as Chang Lung. It is in these different worlds that he has caught the minds of his readers. His latest series, the Wheel of Time, is viewed as an addicting masterpiece upon which you can find fan-sites about on several different web pages. His way of writing allows the reader to find information between the lines, that is, for one thing, the reason to why this series has so many fan-sites with discussion forums. Each person reading the book, develops their own ideas of what is going to happen, and some reveals their apprehension about the plots in the forums.

To the question why so many people like fantasy literature Robert Jordan answers:
“Two things, really, I think. One, you can talk about good and evil, right and wrong, and nobody tells you that you’re being judgmental. And the other thing is, in fantasy there’s always the belief that you can overcome whatever obstacles there are, that you can make tomorrow better. And not only that you can, but that you will, if you work at it.”

Being a fellow with many interests, he enjoys history, hunting, fishing, sailing, poker, chess, pool and of course, writing books. He likes being an author, to the grade, that he intends to continue as one until they nail shut his coffin.