John Sandford was born "John Roswell Camp" on February 23, 1944, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and bestselling novelist, he worked for the Miami Herald from 1971 to 1978 and in 1978 he moved to Minneapolis and started working for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press.

He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, for a series of stories on Native American culture, and in 1986 he won the Pulitzer for a series of stories collectively titled "Life on the Land: An American Farm Family." The series, written during the midwest farm crisis, followed a typical southwest Minnesota farm family through the course of a full year.

He stopped writing full-time for the Pioneer Press in 1989, and stopped entirely the next year; he began to take an interest in novel writing, he eventually wrote two novels that would spring to life his two best-selling series. First came The Fool's Run of the Kidd series, then Rules of Prey a detective story for the Prey series.

When both novels were accepted and were due to be published three months apart, the publisher asked John to provide pseudonym for Rules of Prey; The Fool's Run was published under the name "John Camp", while Rules of Prey published under the name "John Sandford". After the Prey series proved to be more popular, The Fool's Run and all of its subsequent sequels have been published under the "Sandford" name.