Douglas Preston

Douglas Preston’s journey as a writer began not with calm contemplation, but with chaos, curiosity, and a dose of sibling rivalry. Born in 1956 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and raised in the suburb of Wellesley, Preston’s childhood was anything but quiet. He lost a fingertip to a bicycle, his front teeth to his brother Richard’s fist, and suffered a number of broken bones, most of them courtesy of youthful brawls with the same brother. Richard, for the record, went on to write The Hot Zone and The Cobra Event, which gives some idea of the dynamic they shared growing up.

As boys, Douglas, Richard, and their younger brother David became infamous in their neighborhood for their wild experiments. With the help of comic book mail-order kits and chemistry sets, they launched rockets, mixed up volatile compounds, and once nearly injured a man while attempting to fly a rocket into Wellesley Square. They regularly featured in the “Police Notes” section of The Wellesley Townsman. It is something of a miracle that they made it through childhood unharmed.

After being rejected by Stanford University, Preston enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont, California. There he explored a wide range of subjects including mathematics, biology, physics, anthropology, chemistry, geology, and astronomy before settling on English literature. Following graduation, he began working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he served as editor, writer, and eventually manager of publications. He also taught writing at Princeton University and worked as managing editor of Curator magazine. His time at the museum led to the nonfiction book Dinosaurs in the Attic, edited by Lincoln Child, a young and promising editor at St. Martin’s Press.

It was during a late-night tour of the museum that Child turned to Preston in the darkened Hall of Late Dinosaurs and remarked that it would be the perfect setting for a thriller. That moment sparked the idea for Relic, the first in a long line of bestselling suspense novels the two would write together.

In 1986, Preston packed up his life in New York and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to pursue writing full time, taking to heart S. J. Perelman’s advice that the freelance life offers “the dubious privilege of starving anywhere.” He eventually found success with Cities of Gold, a nonfiction account of Coronado’s search for the Seven Cities of Cibola. To write it, he and a friend retraced 1,000 miles of Coronado’s journey on horseback through Arizona and New Mexico, camping under the stars and risking their lives along the way.

Preston went on to write other nonfiction books about the American Southwest, including Talking to the Ground and The Royal Road, along with a novel titled Jennie. In the early 1990s, he reunited with Lincoln Child to co-author a series of thrillers that followed Relic, including Riptide and Thunderhead. Despite living 500 miles apart, the two managed to write collaboratively through phone calls, faxes, and eventually the internet.

He and his brother Richard also ventured into television, working on a miniseries for ABC and Mandalay Entertainment that was set to air in spring 2000, pending the usual unpredictability of Hollywood.

In addition to his books, Preston has maintained a strong presence in journalism. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and has written for National Geographic, Natural History, Smithsonian, Harper’s, and Travel & Leisure, among others.

To learn more about Douglas Preston, visit his Macmillan author page.