John Jakes

New York Times best-selling author John Jakes (1932 2023) created Brak the Barbarian for a tale published in Fantastic Stories (March 1965). The collected Brak tales later appeared in five volumes, beginning with Brak the Barbarian in 1968.

Jakes also is the creator of the eight-volume Kent Family Chronicles, the Main and Hazard families of The North and South Trilogy, and the Crowns of Chicago, German-Americans whose stories interweave the history of the twentieth century in Homeland and its sequel, American Dreams. His 2002 novel, Charleston, returned him to the turbulent years of the Revolution and the Civil War, and became his sixteenth consecutive New York Times bestseller.

Until its demise in the 1980s, Jakes was a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers’ Guild of America (SAGA) whose other members included Poul Anderson, L. Sprague de Camp, Fritz Leiber, and Michael Moorcock.