James Haley

Award-winning historian and novelist James L. Haley grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Texas at Arlington with a B.A. in Government-Pre Law. He attended the UT Austin School of Law for two years before resigning to pursue a literary career.

He is the author of some twenty books, including contemporary and historical fiction, and the history of Texas and the American West. Critically he is known as a practitioner of what they call “narrative history,” presenting a subject that some might find dry or academic in a lively and compelling way. He wrote his first book, The Buffalo War: The History of the Red River Indian Uprisig of 1874-1875, when he was twenty-two, and it is still in print. Among several prizes he has won the Western Writers of America Spur Award twice, and the Texas Historical Commission T. R. Fehrenbach Book Award twice. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and a Fellow of the Texas State Historical Society.

His most recent nonfiction includes Wolf, a prize-winning biography of Jack London; a history of the Texas Supreme Court; and Captive Paradise, a widely and well reviewed history of Hawaii. In fiction, the distinguished house of G. P. Putnam’s Sons will launch an important new naval adventure series with Haley’s The Shores of Tripoli: Lieutenant Putnam and the Barbary Pirates, on November 1, 2016.