Bestselling Author  │ Novelist │ Memoirist
 
“…Jarhead is more than just the latest, most eloquent writing to emerge from the Gulf War...In Swofford's conflicted psyche and lucid prose can be seen the evolution not only of the war memoir but of American attitudes toward war—and war's current place in the American consciousness.”

--Justin Ewers, U.S. News & World Report

Author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling memoir, Jarhead, A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (Scribner, 2003), Anthony Swofford served as a lance corporal in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the 1991 Gulf War.  After finishing his military service, he attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In time, he wrote a book about his experiences in the Marines that rushed him to the forefront of media news and literary fame.  Published on the eve of the Iraq War, Jarhead reveals Swofford as an eloquent and brazenly honest spokesman for the “grunt” who is as aware of the political realities of the war as he is of the irresistible seduction of warfare.

“Swofford writes from the point of view of the killer he was trained to be. He offers little in the way of apology for that young man—except insofar as the whole book is an apology.”

--Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

The film adaptation of Jarhead, directed by Sam Mendes (Oscar and Golden Globe winner for “American Beauty”), was released in the fall of 2005.
 
For the 17-year-old Swofford, enlisting in the Marines was a frightening but sanctified passage to manhood, offering the promise of high-tech sharpshooting and the ability to continue his family’s military legacy for a third generation. Yet from the moment he was recruited to long after his four years of service ended, the trajectory of Swofford's life has been jarred and obscured, threatened with meaninglessness by a slew of atrocities, ironies, and existential hauntings.

“[Jarhead] is a book that smokes and screams in your hands. With a sniper's cold and unforgiving eye, Swofford has found the nexus between nihilism and language, a language ripped, homegrown, American-made, trashy and lyrical and bold. He hits the troubling, difficult mark again and again in this remarkable memoir. Brash, honest, and most unnerving, Jarhead delivers coruscating and unpleasant truths about war and warriors.”

--Joy Williams
 
Swofford crafts this cacophony into a violent and pensive memoir. Ten years in the making, it is “a Hieronymous Bosch painting of hell, combined with something out of Blade Runner: spectral oil well fires burning day and night, as a petrol rain falls on the basted desert and psy-ops helicopters fly overhead…” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). Swofford’s combination of open-eyed intelligence, literary tendencies (he brought a copy of the Illiad to battle), and loyalty to his fellow infantry “jarheads” (the least respected military group on the ground) have produced a work of singular clarity and passion.
 
“Rare is the Marine who is willing to share the raw experience, and rarer still is one like Swofford—the Marine who can really write. Jarhead is some kind of classic, a bracing memoir of the 1991 Persian Gulf War that will go down with the best books ever written about military life. It is certainly the most honest memoir I have read from a participant in any recent war. Swofford writes with humor, anger and great skill. His prose is alive with ideas and feeling, and at times soars like poetry. He captures the hilarity, tedium, horniness and loneliness of the long prewar desert deployment, and then powerfully records the experience of his war. As he moves through a nightmare landscape of exploding ordnance, raining petroleum, the threat of invisible killing gases, and death, his terror and his joy are one.”

--Mark Bowden, The New York Times Book Review
 
Swofford captures the complex, contradictory, and tragic modern soldier with precise prose that is simultaneously moving and unsentimental. His experience as a Marine, writer, and teacher affords him the ability to speak compellingly on many subjects—the writing life, contemporary military experience and policy, memoirs, and the American male psyche.
 
After serving in the Marine Corps from 1988-1992, Swofford attended the University of California at Davis, where he received his BA in 1999. He went on to get an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he also served as Assistant Editor in fiction at The Iowa Review.  A 2002 Michener-Copernicus Society of America Fiction Fellowship recipient, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Lewis & Clark College, and St. Mary’s College. For Jarhead he received the PEN/Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir Award.

Swofford’s writings have appeared in a variety of publications including The New York Times, Harper’s, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Tin House, and Details magazine.

Swofford lives in New York City, where he is at work on a novel and other writing projects.

Books

• Exit A: A Novel (Scribner, 2007)
• Jarhead, A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (Scribner, 2003)

Honors and Awards

• 2002  Michener-Copernicus Society of America Fiction Fellowship
• 2003  PEN/Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir Award

Media

To hear a 2003 interview with Anthony Swofford on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, click here.

To read an interview with Anthony Swofford in Mother Jones, click here.