Anthony Swofford - Writing Career

Writing Career

While attending the American River College, a community college in Sacramento, Swofford was published in and was the-editor-in-chief of the American River Review, an award-winning literary magazine. Later, he received a Bachelor's degree in English from University of California, Davis and earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa.

Swofford committed himself to writing in 1995, at the age of 24, and built on the encouragement he received at college to write Jarhead, which documents his time spent in the Gulf. In the book he portrays a grim view of life as a Marine, and indeed shows himself in a rather unflattering light. He said himself, "I could have written a flattering portrait of myself as a young Marine, but it would have been a much lesser book." Reviewing Jarhead for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani said the book combined "the black humor of Catch-22 with the savagery of Full Metal Jacket and the visceral detail of The Things They Carried." He received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir for Jarhead in 2004.

Following his time at the University of Iowa, Swofford served as an English professor at Lewis and Clark College, where he taught a class in the school's "Inventing America" program, and St. Mary's College of California until he sold the film rights to Jarhead. Swofford has had articles, both fiction and non-fiction, published in The New York Times, Harper's, Men's Journal, The Iowa Review, and other publications. He is a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient and lives in New York. His first novel, Exit A, was published in January 2007. His newest memoir, Hotels Hospitals and Jails, was published by Twelve on June 5th 2012. In 2012, Swofford was featured in a cinematic book trailer for his memoir "Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails," which was produced by Red 14 Films.