Stephen Hunter
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Stephen Hunter (born March 25, 1946) is an American novelist, essayist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic.
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[edit] Biography
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Hunter is one of four children of 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 U.S. Army as a ceremonial soldier in the Old Guard (3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment) in Washington, D.C., and later wrote for a military paper, the Pentagram.
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 Metacritic he generally grades films lower than the average critic. He is a frequent guest on The Tony Kornheiser Show for his movie reviews. In 1998 Hunter won the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award in the criticism category, and in 2003 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. After a divorce, he remarried in 2005. He has two children.
While respected for his film criticism, Hunter 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."[citation needed]
President Bill Clinton was famously pictured during the Monica Lewinsky affair holding a copy of Time to Hunt, an association that affected 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."[citation needed]
Hunter has written three non-fiction books, including 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 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] Works
[edit] Novels
- 1980 The Master Sniper
- 1982 The Second Saladin
- 1985 Target (film novelization)
- 1985 The Spanish Gambit (reissued as Tapestry of Spies)
- 1989 The Day Before Midnight
- 1993 Point of Impact
- 1994 Dirty White Boys
- 1996 Black Light
- 1998 Time to Hunt
- 2000 Hot Springs
- 2001 Pale Horse Coming
- 2003 Havana
- 2007 The 47th Samurai
[edit] Non-fiction
- 1995 Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem
- 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
[edit] Articles
- 2001 Dressed To Kill - From Kabul to Kandahar, It's Not Who You Are That Matters, but What You Shoot
- 2002 The Scope of Shared Tragedy - Simple Tools, Complex Crimes
- 2004 Thompson: On the Side of Law and Order
[edit] External links
Categories: Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | American film critics | American crime fiction writers | American thriller writers | American novelists | Baltimore Sun people | Washington Post people | Missouri writers | Maryland writers | United States Army soldiers | Northwestern University alumni | People from Kansas City | People from Baltimore | 1946 births | Living people
