Author Biography and Bibliography

Philip José Farmer was born in 1918 in North Terra Haute, Indiana. He has been a resident of Peoria, Illinois since he was four years old, with breaks in Syracuse, New York, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Scottsdale, Arizona, Beverly Hills, California, and Los Angeles, California. Through his father's line he is descended from the actual Barons Greystoke, not to mention a Viking Earl of Orkney, Thornfinn the Skull-Splitter, and a co-king of Viking Dublin, Ivar the Boneless, and his brother Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye.

Farmer was a letterman in football and track at Peoria High School. He attended Bradley University, graduating in 1950 with a bachelor's degree in English literature. He worked as a groundsman for a streetcar company, in a steel mill, at LeTourneau-Westinghouse, in a dairy, and as a space-defense industry technical advisor.

His first fiction sale came in 1945 to Adventure magazine. His first science fiction story was a novella, "The Lovers," that appeared in Startling Stories in 1952 and broke the taboo against the use of mature sex in a science fiction magazine. Farmer has had approximately eighty short stories and seventy books published, including novels, collections of short stories, and two "biographies," Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life. His first full-length mystery, Nothing Burns in Hell, was published in 1998, and his first official Tarzan novel, The Dark Heart of Time, came out in 1999. His works have been translated into twenty-one languages.

His most popular series are the award-winning Riverworld saga and the World of Tiers series. His Tarzan pastiches include A Feast Unknown, Lord Tyger, and Lord of the Trees. He has won three Hugo Awards: in 1953 as the most promising writer of 1952; for the 1967 novella "Riders of the Purple Wage"; and in 1972 for the first Riverworld novel, To Your Scattered Bodies Go. He was named the SWFA Grand Master of the year 2001.

He was married in 1941 to Bette Andre. They are still married in 2003.

Visit the Official Philip José Farmer Homepage for more information.