Raised Inside History
Born in New York City, Ralph Pezzullo was five when his father joined the Foreign Service. The family moved every two or three years: Mexico, South Vietnam, Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Uruguay and Nicaragua.
In Saigon he lived through the overthrow of Diem and near daily attacks on Americans. In La Paz, Che Guevara was building a guerrilla base. By 1980 his father was US Ambassador to Nicaragua, and Ralph witnessed the first days of the Sandinista Revolution.
Growing up among diplomats, CIA officers and military attachés, he learned how policy succeeds or fails on the ground. That understanding runs through every book he has written.
He did not come to history from the outside. Through his father he met many of the historical political figures of the age, in Washington and in capitals around the world. As a boy he met President Richard Nixon. He sat and talked with the people who were shaping events, the way other children talk with the adults at the dinner table. The path he took was a natural one.
The boy who listened to them became the man who writes their stories.
A Writer’s Path
After earning a master’s degree in international affairs, Ralph worked on Capitol Hill and as an Associated Press correspondent covering Latin America. As a journalist he has written for the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, GQ and the Miami Herald. In New York he wrote plays, every one of them produced in the city, along with campaign speeches and screenplays. He has since written for the major film studios and worked with directors including Oliver Stone, Antoine Fuqua and James Foley. His books have sold more than six million copies and been published in more than twenty languages. He lives in Los Angeles.
In 2004 a clandestine US intelligence officer asked him to collaborate on a book. Jawbreaker, the account of the CIA led campaign against the Taliban in late 2001, became a bestseller and brought Ralph the stories of DEA and FBI agents, detectives, Special Forces soldiers and Navy SEALs.
- Writers Guild of America
- The Dramatists Guild
- Authors League of America
- Mystery Writers of America
- International Thriller Writers
- PEN USA
- Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training
What They Say About Ralph
Based on his unique access to sources and a playwright’s sense of language, character and drama . . .
Highly ambitious and especially valuable . . . a major contribution to the resources on Haiti itself.
Mann and Pezzullo’s depiction of today’s world of transnational crime and U.S. clandestine operations is frightening, balanced, and on the mark.
When Pezzullo makes a claim you can check, he shows you where to check it. That discipline is rare.
Pezzullo comes out swinging . . . This is one writer to watch out for.
Author Pezzullo’s terse dialogue and raw descriptions . . . the seamiest side of the roughest streets in New York.
Good Writers Borrow, Great Writers Steal
Oscar Wilde’s line is one Ralph likes to quote. Growing up in La Paz, Saigon and Bogotá in the 1960s, where television barely existed, he spent his free time with books: Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, Melville, Twain, Tolstoy, Nabokov and Beckett. He never took a writing class or attended a workshop. He learned by responding to the writers he loved.
He took character and drama from Shakespeare, a direct, journalistic style from Hemingway and Henry Miller, musicality from the poetry of Neruda and Machado, and dialogue from Tennessee Williams and Pinter. In thrillers his favourites are Ian Fleming, for his economy and audacity, and John le Carré, for the moral dilemmas of our age.
“What they all had in common was a great sense of yearning, which I learned was the impetus of all creativity.”
A Musician At Heart
Music came first. According to his mother, Ralph would sing along to symphonies before he could walk. As a teenager in Bogotá he joined Wallflower Complexion, remembered by music writers as a seminal Latin rock garage band, and the first of dozens of groups he has played in ever since.
More than fifty countries have shaped his ear, from cumbia, salsa and samba to reggae, folk and psychedelic rock. His influences run from the Beatles, Stravinsky and Antonio Carlos Jobim to Bob Marley, Curtis Mayfield and Radiohead. A singer, songwriter and guitarist, he has written and produced albums of his own.
