Stephen Hunter

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stephen Hunter is an American novelist, essayist, and film critic.

Hunter was born March 25, 1946 in Kansas City, Missouri, one of four children to Charles Francis Hunter, a college speech professor, and Virginia Ricker Hunter, a writer of children's books. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1968 with a degree in journalism, he spent two years in the US Army as a ceremonial soldier in the Old Guard (3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment) in Washington, D.C. and later writing for a military paper, the Pentagram News.

In 1971 he joined the Baltimore Sun as a film critic, a post he held until 1996 when he moved to the Washington Post in the same function. According to www.metacritic.com he generally grades films lower than the average critic, though some would say on average he writes more intelligently. He was a frequent guest on The Tony Kornheiser Show on ESPN Radio and then WTEM for his movie reviews. In 1998 he won the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award in the criticism category. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2003. After a divorce, he remarried in 2005. He has two children.

While respected for his film criticism, he is more widely known for his thriller novels. Of these, Point of Impact, Black Light and Time to Hunt form a trilogy, featuring Vietnam veteran and sniper Bob 'the Nailer' Swagger. Hot Springs, Pale Horse Coming, and Havana form another trilogy centered on Bob Swagger's father, Earl. The plot of Dirty White Boys is also connected to the stories in the Swagger series. His novels are all violent, a theme on which he once commented, "My feelings about violence are very powerful. It seems to provoke my imagination in an odd way."

Bill Clinton, while President, was famously pictured during the Monica Lewinsky affair holding Time to Hunt, an association that affected Stephen Hunter's decision not to name Mena as the county seat of Polk County, Arkansas in Pale Horse Coming due to "a whole conspiracy culture based around suspicions that Bill Clinton used the Mena airport to ship cocaine into Arkansas."

Stephen Hunter has written a non-fiction book, Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem (1995), a collection of essays from his time at the Baltimore Sun, and a number of articles for the Washington Post, including one on Afghanistan: "Dressed To Kill - From Kabul to Kandahar, It's Not Who You Are That Matters, but What You Shoot".

[edit] Bibliography

1980 The Master Sniper
1982 The Second Saladin
1985 Target Film novelization
1985 The Spanish Gambit aka Tapestry of Spies
1989 The Day Before Midnight
1993 Point of Impact
1994 Dirty White Boys
1995 Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem
1996 Black Light
1998 Time to Hunt
2000 Hot Springs
2001 Pale Horse Coming
2003 Havana
2005 Now Playing at the Valencia : Pulitzer Prize-Winning Essays on Movies
2005 American Gunfight : The Plot to Kill Harry Truman and the Shoot-out that Stopped It