Before the tale of Rand al’Thor, the epic story of the Wheel of Time humbly begins with a man named Jim, known to the world as Robert Jordan, author of the best-selling Wheel of Time series. James Oliver Rigney, Jr. was born October 17, 1948 in Charleston, South Carolina.
Growing up, he’d often told about lining up I think Jules Verne, Mark Twain and Jack London, and thinking, “I want to write books.”
He joined the Army in 1968 and served two tours in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner.
He returned to begin college at The Citadel as a veteran student and took a job as a civilian nuclear engineer working for the United States Navy.
And it was during this time that he took a hard look at his life and decided to become a full-time writer.
He was in the hospital with a blood clot when he did the famous—the thing so many people talk about doing—he threw a book across the room and said, “I can do better than that.” He wrote something called Warriors of the Altaii . I read it, and…no, it wasn’t what I was interested in. But it showed he could do it. So I gave him a contract for a book that became The Fallon Blood . We’d been seeing a lot of each other. He brought a tiger claw from Vietnam to show my son. Will came running upstairs to my office one day and said, “Mom, he’ll take me to see the Star Trek movie.” And I said, “Can I come too?” And he said yes. And I guess that was our first date.
She edited Jim, and they fell in love, and they got married, and we all became friends.
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