Will Ryan

Will Ryan

Biography

Will Ryan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Philadelphia and in Elkins Park, a suburb. He earned his Bachelor of Science Degree, served in the Army Corps of Engineers in Vietnam, returned home, then returned to Vietnam. Back in the states once again, he pursued careers in industry, mostly in the New York area with private companies, then in various capacities with the U.S. Department of Defense and, finally, eleven years at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Along the way, he earned an advanced degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University and did Doctoral work at Pace University. He also taught courses at several different colleges and universities.

So far, he's written five novels. He's also written one non-fiction book on United States Appropriation Law. During the 1990s he had a weekly column in a local newspaper (now defunct) and wrote literally hundreds of editorials on everything from Constitutional Law to the Anniversary of the Death of Elvis. Some of them still survive in cyberspace. Nothing these days is ever totally lost.

Among the writers he learned to admire and love are, in no particular order, Alice Bell (see her "Kiss the Stars"), Emily Brontė, Emile Zola, Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Patrick O'Brian, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Amy Tan, Theodore Dostoyevsky, Andrei Solzhenitsyn, Stephen King (sometimes), Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo, Herman Melville, Philip Kerr, Olen Steinhauer, Martin Dugard (read his "Into Africa"), Duong Thu Huong (who deserves a Nobel Prize), V.S. Naipaul, Christopher Isherwood, Yukio Mishima, HL Mencken (his style, not his substance), William Styron, Bernard Cornwall, many others.