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Robert Jordan believes that fantasy is an enduring form of literature because it reaches "something deep in people; their dreams." He feels that fantasy literature appeals to a desire for a simpler time of life with recognizable good and evil, and that fantasy provides a universe with rules, order and underlying framework. The author has both a degree in physics and a military background, unusual credits for a fantasy writer.
"Robert Jordan" is actually a pseudonym for James Oliver Rigney, Jr., under which he has written the "Wheel of Time" fantasy series as well as several books of the "Conan" series. Other pseudonyms are Reagan O'Neal ("Fallon" series), Jackson O'Reilly ("Cheyenne Raiders"), and Chang Lung.
A lifelong resident of Charleston, South Carolina, Jordan was born in 1948. With a brother 12 years his senior, Robert began his education at an early age, and his future interest in fantastic literature was inevitable. "When my parents couldn't get a baby-sitter, they'd get my brother," he recalls. "He would read to me, not kids' books, but things he was interested in, like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Mark Twain, so I was exposed to a lot of great fiction.
Jordan served two tours of duty in Vietnam (from 1968-70), earning the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Bronze star. The Vietnamese twice awarded him with their Cross of Gallantry. After Vietnam, he entered the Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, where he received a degree in physics. In retrospect, Robert Jordan feels that physics is not such an unusual background for a fantasy writer. "You can't study quantum mechanics without a feel for fantasy," he recently reflected, "Schrodinger's Cat alone will kill any logical person dead." After attaining his degree, he was employed by the Navy as a nuclear engineer. He was hospitalized for an injury which gave him a great deal of time to catch up on his reading. Jordan quickly ran out of satisfactory material, and in exasperation, thought he could probably write as well as the authors he had been reading....
...and the Wheel of Time series is the happy result. With intricate plotting, positively Byzantine politics and characters who have become as familiar to us as a brother or sister over the lengthy course of the series, the gargantuan story has garnered an astonishingly strong following of fans, who revel in all the as-yet-unrevealed answers to plot twists and other mysteries that Jordan has seeded into the books by the score.
Robert Jordan has now been writing for 13 years, and he has been married for ten. He and his wife live in the Old Historic District of Charleston, in a house dating from 1797. A history buff, he is particularly interested in Charleston's past, and in military history. An outdoors man, Jordan enjoys hunting fishing and sailing, and the indoor sports of poker, chess and pool, and collecting pipes.
The Wheel of Time:
The Eye of the World
The Great Hunt
The Dragon Reborn
The Shadow Rising
The Fires of Heaven
Lord of Chaos
A Crown of Swords