Ralph Peters

Ralph Peters is a prize-winning, bestselling novelist and the author of innovative works on strategy and security. A retired U.S. Army officer and former enlisted soldier, his unusual career took him from Moscow to Mandalay and from the Middle East to Latin America. After leaving the military, he also worked as a columnist, a popular media commentator and a "strategic scout" in the developing world. Early works, such as "Red Army" and "The War in 2020," had contemporary military themes, but after leaving uniformed service he concentrated largely on the American Civil War. Under the pen-name "Owen Parry," he wrote six award-winning mystery novels set during the Civil War, as well as two collections of Christmas tales for adults. Then, under his own name, he embarked upon what became the five-book Battle Hymn Cycle, works he describes as "dramatized history, but, above all, accurate, honest history." The books take the reader from Gettysburg to Appomattox, capturing the brutal reality and high drama of the war in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. The first three volumes in the cycle, "Cain at Gettysburg," "Hell or Richmond," and "Valley of the Shadow," each won the American Library Association's Boyd Award, and volumes in the critically acclaimed series have won various other prizes. A prequel to the cycle, "Darkness at Chancellorsville," will appear in May, 2019. A secret until recently, Peters quietly wrote a novel about playing rock music in the late 1960s, which he published under the pen-name "Robert Paston." In recent years, he was inducted into the U.S. Army's Officer Candidate School Hall of Fame and received the Goodpaster Award as an outstanding American soldier-scholar. After more than two decades in the military and a further two decades of media work and research, he now concentrates on writing and pursues his long-time hobbies of travel, languages, classic literature, history and fitness.