Cemetery Dance

About Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child

Douglas Preston was born in Massachusetts in 1956. Notable events in his early life included the loss of a fingertip at the age of three to a bicycle and the loss of his two front teeth to his brother's fist.

After graduating, Preston worked at the American Museum of Natural History. His stint at the Museum resulted in the non-fiction book, Dinosaurs in the Attic, edited by a young star at St. Martin's Press, Lincoln Child. When Preston gave Child a midnight tour of the museum, in the darkened Hall of Dinosaurs, under a looming T. Rex, Child turned to Preston and said: "This would make the perfect setting for a thriller".

Finally after several non-fiction books, Preston and Child teamed up to write suspense novels. Preston and Child live 500 miles apart but write their books together via telephone, fax, and the Internet.
Preston continues a magazine writing career, contributing regularly to The New Yorker. He has also written for National Geographic, Natural History, Harper's and Travel & Leisure, among others.

He counts in his ancestry the poet Emily Dickinson and the infamous murderer and opium addict Amasa Greenough. Preston and his wife, Christine, have three children, and live on the coast of Maine.

After a childhood that is of interest only to himself, Lincoln Child majored in English. Discovering a fascination for words, and their habit of turning up in so many books, he made his way to New York intent on finding a job in publishing. Over the next several years, he clawed his way up the publishing hierarchy, becoming an editor at St. Martin's - with titles as diverse as The Notation of Western Music and Hitler's Rocket Sites - but focused primarily on popular fiction. Lincoln's own nascent interests in writing only came to fruition after he left publishing. He now lives in New Jersey with his wife and daughter.

A dilettante by natural inclination, Lincoln's interests include: pre-1950s literature and poetry; post-1950s popular fiction; playing the piano, various MIDI instruments, and the 5-string banjo; English and American history; motorcycles; architecture; classical music, early jazz, blues, and R&B; exotic parrots; esoteric programming languages; mountain hiking; bow ties; Italian suits; fedoras; archaeology; and multiplayer deathmatching.