Stephen Hunter

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Stephen Hunter is an American author born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1946. One of four children born to Charles Hunter, a college speech professor, and Virginia Hunter, a writer of children's books, Stephen Hunter graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in journalism in 1968, spent two years in the US Army as a ceremonial soldier in the Old Guard (US 3rd Infantry Regiment) in Washington, D.C and later writing for a military paper, the Pentagram News. In 1971 he joined the Baltimore Sun becoming a film critic, where he stayed until 1996 when he moved to the Washington Post to continue film criticism. According to www.metacritic.com he generally grades films lower than the average critic, though some would say on average he writes more intelligently. After a divorce, he remarried in 2005. He has two children.

He appears frequently on The Tony Kornheiser Show on WTEM for his movie reviews.

In 1998 Stephen Hunter won the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award in the criticism category, and the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2003. While respected for his film criticism, he is most famous for his thrillers. Point of Impact, Black Light and Time to Hunt form a trilogy, featuring Vietnam veteran and sniper Bob 'the Nailer' Swagger, and Hot Springs, Pale Horse Coming, and Havana form another featuring Bob Swagger's father, Earl (the plot of Dirty White Boys book is also connected to the stories in Swagger series. They are all violent, and he has said "My feelings about violence are very powerful. It seems to provoke my imagination in an odd way."

Bill Clinton, while President, was famously pictured during the Monica Lewinsky affair holding Time to Hunt, and coincidently had an effect on Stephen Hunter's decision not to use Mena as the county seat of Polk County 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."

Stephen Hunter has written a non-fiction book, 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, as well as a number of articles for 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".

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