Douglas Preston has published over thirty-six books of both nonfiction and fiction, of which twenty-nine have been New York Times bestsellers. He is the co-author, with Lincoln Child, of the Agent Pendergast thrillers.
In addition to his fiction work, he has written about archaeology and anthropology for the New Yorker Magazine, worked as an editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University.
Douglas was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1956, and grew up in the suburb of Wellesley. Douglas attended Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he studied mathematics, biology, physics, anthropology, and geology before settling down to English literature. He counts in his ancestry the poet Emily Dickinson and the obstetrician and early sexologist Robert Latou Dickinson. Preston’s great-grandfather eight times back was Samuel Wardwell, who was hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692 and is listed in the Salem Witch Trials Memorial.
After graduating, Douglas began his career at the American Museum of Natural History in New York as an editor, writer, and manager of publications. It was during his time at the museum that he was approached by Lincoln Child to write Dinosaurs in the Attic, a non-fiction book about the museum. Lincoln was working as an editor at St. Martin’s Press at the time. The book was published in 1986. Douglas gave Lincoln a midnight tour of the museum during this time. Douglas recounts that “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!’ That thriller would, of course, be Relic.” Their first writing collaboration would be published ten years later.
Douglas moved to Sante Fe to write full time in 1986. He published several nonfiction books during this time, including Cities of Gold (1992), an account of his 1000-mile journey retracing on horseback Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s violent and unsuccessful search for the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola. He also wrote Jennie (1994), a novel based on the real story of the chimpanzee who inspired Curious George.
Throughout his writing career, Douglas has gone on several remarkable expeditions around the world. He was the first person in 3,000 years to enter an ancient Egyptian burial chamber in a tomb known as KV5 in the Valley of the Kings. He participated in an expedition that led to the discovery of an ancient city in an unexplored valley in the Mosquitia mountains of Eastern Honduras. He recounts this journey in The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story (2017). And he went deep into Khmer Rouge-held territory in the Cambodian jungle with a small army of soldiers to become the first Westerner to visit a lost Angkor temple.
In 2000, Douglas moved to Florence, Italy, with his young family and became fascinated with an unsolved local murder mystery involving a serial killer nicknamed the “Monster of Florence.” He co-authored a nonfiction book of the same title with Italian journalist Mario Spezi in 2006, which recounts their investigation and clashes with the Italian authorities.
Among Douglas’ other solo works is his fictional thriller Wyman Ford series. Douglas has actively supported many author organizations throughout the years. He participated in the first USO author tour sponsored by the International Thriller Writers organization (an organization he co-founded). He founded Authors United to support authors during a dispute between Amazon and the publisher Hachette, and he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. In 2011, Pomona College conferred on Douglas the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa. He serves on the advisory board of the School for Advanced Research. He has also served as President of the Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest association of authors and journalists.
