Writing Career
Jakes published several stories and novels over the 20 years following completion of college, many of them fantasy fiction, science fiction and westerns and other sorts of historical fiction, while working in the advertising industry. In 1971, he began to write full time.
During this time, he was also a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose-knit group of heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies.
He gained widespread popularity with the publication of his Kent Family Chronicles, which became a bestselling American Bicentennial Series of books in the mid to late 1970s, selling 55 million copies. He has since published several more popular works of historical fiction, most dealing with American history, including the North and South Trilogy about the U.S. Civil War, which sold 10 million copies and was turned into an ABC-TV miniseries.
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