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You are here: Home > Authors > McCammon, Robert

VJ Books Presents Robert McCammon!

Robert Rick McCammon was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on 17 July 1952, the son of Jack (a musician) and Barbara Bundy McCammon. The marriage failed, and McCammon was raised by his grandparents in Birmingham. He received a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Alabama in 1974, and currently resides in Birmingham, married to Sally Sanders, with whom he has a daughter, Skye.

Despite this strong association with the South, its history and traditions played little substantial role in his early work. Nevertheless, paralleling his development as a writer has been an apparent acceptance of his southern heritage, and the last two novels he produced before his self-imposed hiatus---Boy's Life and Gone South---are both set in the Deep South and make use of its heritage and traditions. Furthermore, McCammon's works often contain references and asides that cannot be fully appreciated unless one is familiar with Birmingham.

Following graduation, McCammon wrote advertising copy for Birmingham businesses and newspapers. Failing to get his short stories into print, he wrote Baal (1978), an ambitious effort having as its basis the biblical Book of Revelations and the ultimate conflict between limited Good and limitless Evil. In the afterword to the 1988 edition of Baal, McCammon stated that "Baal is about power, written at a time when I had none," adding that "you always hear this said to young writers, 'write about what you know.' I wanted to write about things I didn't know, so I consciously set Baal in locations as far from the South as possible: Boston, the Middle East, and Greenland. I wanted a global scale and a story that would take the reader to the very edge of Armageddon."

McCammon's second published novel was actually his third novel. He had followed Baal with The Night Boat (1980), but the publisher decided that The Night Boat might be too similar to a recently released motion picture called Shock Waves. McCammon thus wrote Bethany's Sin (1980), after which the publisher decided to publish The Night Boat. Upon acceptance of the latter, McCammon decided to become a full-time writer.