Stephen Hunter
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For the American basketball player, see Steven Hunter.
| Stephen Hunter | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 25, 1946 Kansas City, Missouri, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist, film critic |
| Nationality | American |
| Writing period | 1971 – present |
| Genres | Thrillers |
| Notable work(s) | Point of Impact (1993) |
Stephen Hunter (born March 25, 1946) is an American novelist, essayist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic. He currently resides in Columbia, Maryland.
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[edit] Biography
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Hunter is one of four children of Charles Francis Hunter, a college speech professor, and Virginia Ricker Hunter, a writer of children's books. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1968 with a degree in journalism, he spent two years in the U.S. Army as a ceremonial soldier in the Old Guard (3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment) in Washington, D.C., and later wrote for a military paper, the Pentagram News.
In 1971 he joined The Baltimore Sun. He became film critic in 1982, a post he held until 1997, when he moved to The Washington Post in the same function. According to Metacritic he generally grades films lower than the average critic (While working for the Baltimore Sun, it was a joke that if Stephen Hunter didn't like a film, you probably would). He is a frequent guest on The Tony Kornheiser Show for his movie reviews. In 1998 Hunter won the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award in the criticism category, and in 2003 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. After a divorce, he remarried in 2005. He has two children.
While respected for his film criticism, Hunter is more widely known for his thriller novels. Of these, Point of Impact, Black Light and Time to Hunt form a trilogy featuring Vietnam veteran and sniper Bob "the Nailer" Swagger. (The 2007 film Shooter was loosely based on Point of Impact.) Hot Springs, Pale Horse Coming, and Havana form another trilogy centered on Bob Swagger's father, Earl. His novels are all violent, a theme on which he once commented, "My feelings about violence are very powerful. It seems to provoke my imagination in an odd way."[citation needed]
Many of Hunter's novels take place within a single loosely-defined world; even those which do not star the same main characters often feature links to each other. The Bob Lee Swagger story Black Light builds on the events and characters of Dirty White Boys, and has a cameo appearance by one of the main characters from The Second Saladin. Time to Hunt, the third of the Bob Lee Swagger novels, includes a small role for Dick Puller, a main character in The Day Before Midnight.
President Bill Clinton was famously pictured during the Monica Lewinsky affair holding a copy of Time to Hunt, an association that affected Hunter's decision not to name Mena as the county seat of Polk County, Arkansas, in Pale Horse Coming, due to "a whole conspiracy culture based around suspicions that Bill Clinton used the Mena airport to ship cocaine into Arkansas."[citation needed]
Hunter has written three non-fiction books: Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem (1995), a collection of essays from his time at The Sun; American Gunfight (2005), an examination of the November 1, 1950 assassination attempt on Harry S. Truman at Blair House in Washington, D.C.; and Now Playing at the Valencia (2005), a collection of pieces from The Washington Post. Hunter has also written a number of non-film-related articles for the The Post, including one on Afghanistan: "Dressed To Kill—From Kabul to Kandahar, It's Not Who You Are That Matters, but What You Shoot". His newest novel, The 47th Samurai, continuing the story of Bob Lee Swagger, was published in September 2007.
[edit] Works
[edit] Novels
- 1980 The Master Sniper
- 1982 The Second Saladin
- 1985 Target (film novelization)
- 1985 The Spanish Gambit (reissued as Tapestry of Spies)
- 1989 The Day Before Midnight
- 1993 Point of Impact
- 1994 Dirty White Boys
- 1996 Black Light
- 1998 Time to Hunt
- 2000 Hot Springs
- 2001 Pale Horse Coming
- 2003 Havana
- 2007 The 47th Samurai
[edit] Non-fiction
- 1995 Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem
- 2005 Now Playing at the Valencia : Pulitzer Prize-Winning Essays on Movies
- 2005 American Gunfight : The Plot to Kill Harry Truman and the Shoot-out that Stopped It
[edit] External links
- Unofficial Web Site
- Wendel, Tim. "Gunslinger Stephen Hunter", Washingtonian, May 1, 2008.
- Articles
- 2001 Dressed To Kill - From Kabul to Kandahar, It's Not Who You Are That Matters, but What You Shoot
- 2002 The Scope of Shared Tragedy - Simple Tools, Complex Crimes
- 2004 Thompson: On the Side of Law and Order
