“The race is to the driven, not the swift.” —John Jakes

John Jakes died on March 11, 2023. Born on March 31, 1932, he damn near made it to his ninety-first birthday. In a literary career spanning seven decades, Jakes established himself as a mainstay of American popular fiction. He started in the pulps, made the bestseller lists and died a millionaire. Two genre categories that Jakes made his mark on—swashbuckling historical adventure and sword-and-sorcery—are directly in the wheelhouse of DMR Blog readers. He deserves an encomium.

John William Jakes was born in Chicago, Illinois--just as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Fritz Leiber before him--during the depths of the Great Depression and mere months before the publication of the first Conan yarn in Weird Tales. His father moved about from job to job and it appears that John always considered Terre Haute, Indiana to be his geographic touchstone. Throughout his life, Jakes described himself as a 'Midwestern' writer. He looked upon writing as a job and that job was to entertain his readers. That is an attitude which has grown ever more rare in the literary scene of the twenty-first century.

Jakes grew up reading the pulps. His first sale was to Fantastic Adventures in 1950. That was a sci-fi tale, but he soon splashed other pulps, especially the Western mags. He would write more SF throughout the '50s, alongside thrillers, Westerns, and historical swashbucklers. It was during this period, the golden age of swashbuckling historical adventure in American paperbacks, that Jakes wrote I, Barbarian. Reprinted two decades later--which is when I bought it--I, Barbarian tells the tale of a Crusader's brat raised by Mongols who joins the horde of Genghis Khan. Bloody, lusty stuff. Sir Scoundrel/King's Crusader, written a few years later, is another gripping, swashbuckling tale set during the age of Saladin and the Lionheart.

In 1963, John wrote his first tae of Brak, the swordsman from Barbaria. This was a few years after Gnome Press had published the Conan yarns in hardcover and several years before the Conan Lancers were published. Jakes stated that he was a fan of REH and Conan and that the Brak tales were written to fill that void. I always found Jakes' Brak to be a bit stolid and reactive, but there are certainly worse 'Clonans'--and 'Conans'--out there. Frazetta would end up painting several iconic Brak covers. In my opinion, the best Brak short story is "Devils in the Walls" and the best Brak novel is Brak versus the Mark of the Demons.

Jakes would go on to join Lin Carter's Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), but his breakthrough came by way of The Bastard, a novel set during the American Revolutionary War period. Many more 'Kent Family Chronicles' novels would follow, as would a Civil War trilogy and TV miniseries to match. John ended up selling over seventy million books.

As John C. Hocking and Morgan Holmes have both pointed out, one of Jakes’ big secrets to success was his depiction of villains. To an extent, every protagonist must be judged by his enemies. Jakes usually made sure that you loved to hate the villains of his tales.

A good general Jakes bibliography can be found here.

Here is a final quote from John Jakes:

“Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.”

Requiescat in pace, John. You were a good man and a good writer.