Douglas Preston

Douglas Preston is an American author and journalist. He has published over forty fiction and non-fiction books, of which more than half have been New York Times bestsellers. Preston is the co-author, with Lincoln Child, of the Pendergast series of thrillers.

Preston and Child’s Relic (1995) and The Cabinet of Curiosities (2002) were chosen by readers in a National Public Radio poll as being among the one hundred greatest thrillers ever written.

He writes about archaeology and anthropology for the New Yorker Magazine, and he worked as an editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and taught non-fiction writing at Princeton University.

Douglas Jerome Preston was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He grew up in the suburb of Wellesley. He attended public schools and the Cambridge School of Weston.

Notable events in his early life included the loss of a fingertip at the age of three to a bicycle; the loss of his two front teeth to his brother Richard's fist; and various broken bones, also incurred in dust-ups with Richard. (Richard went on to write The Hot Zone and The Cobra Event, which tells you all you need to know about what it was like to grow up with him as a brother.)

As they grew up, Doug, Richard, and their little brother David roamed the quiet suburbs of Wellesley, terrorizing the natives with homemade rockets and incendiary devices mail-ordered from the backs of comic books or concocted from chemistry sets. With a friend they once attempted to fly a rocket into Wellesley Square; the rocket malfunctioned and nearly killed a man mowing his lawn.

They were local celebrities, often appearing in the "Police Notes" section of The Wellesley Townsman. It is a miracle they survived childhood intact.

After being rejected by Stanford University, Preston attended Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he studied mathematics, biology, physics, anthropology, chemistry, geology, and astronomy before settling down to English literature.

After graduating, Preston began his career at the American Museum of Natural History in New York as an editor, writer, and eventually manager of publications. (Preston also taught writing at Princeton University and was managing editor of Curator.)

His eight-year stint at the Museum resulted in the non-fiction book, Dinosaurs in the Attic, edited by a rising young star at St. Martin's Press, a polymath by the name of Lincoln Child. During this period, Preston gave Child a midnight tour, and in the darkened Hall of Late Dinosaurs, under a looming T. Rex, Child turned to Preston and said: "This would make the perfect setting for a thriller!"

In 1986, Douglas Preston piled everything he owned into the back of a Subaru and moved from New York City to Santa Fe to write full-time. He is following the advice of humorist S. J. Perelman that "the dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he's given the freedom to starve anywhere."

After the requisite period of penury, Preston achieved a small success with the publication of Cities of Gold, a non-fiction book about Coronado's search for the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola. To research the book, Preston and a friend retraced on horseback 1,000 miles across Arizona and New Mexico, packing their supplies and sleeping under the stars--nearly killing themselves in the process.

Since then, he has published several more non-fiction books on the history of the American Southwest, Talking to the Ground and The Royal Road, as well as a novel entitled Jennie (1994).

In the early 1990s, Preston and Child teamed up to write suspense novels; Relic was the first, followed by several others, including Riptide and Thunderhead. The Relic was released as a motion picture by Paramount in 1997.

Other films are under development at Hollywood studios. Preston and Child live 500 miles apart and write their books together.

Preston is the author of the award-winning non-fiction book The Lost City of the Monkey God (2017). It is about a project headed by documentary filmmakers Steve Elkins and Bill Benenson that used lidar to search for archaeological sites in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve of the Gracias a Dios Department in the Mosquitia region of eastern Honduras.

Preston continues a magazine writing career by contributing regularly to The New Yorker magazine. He has also written for National Geographic, Natural History, Smithsonian, Harper's, and Travel & Leisure, among others.

His most recent work is the thriller Dead Mountain (2023), co-authored with Lincoln Child. The bestselling Nora Kelly series features renowned archaeologist Nora Kelly and FBI Agent Corrie Swanson. They investigate a mystery so enigmatic it may have no solution.

Douglas Preston also serves as President of the Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest association of authors and journalists.

Photo credit: www.prestonchild.com