Karl marlantes author biography format

Karl Marlantes is a veteran and bestselling and prize-winning author. He served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten Air Medals. Later in life, he served as managing director of a multinational corporation based in Singapore and then started his own consultancy practice in the international energy business sector.

In the late 1990s, Marlantes asked the Veterans Administration for help with symptoms caused by post-traumatic stress disorder. He entered counseling, and a decade later finished his first book, "Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War," the novel he’d been working on since returning from Vietnam. The book draws from his own war experiences, and he credits the process of writing it with helping him come to terms with what he saw.

Marlantes published his second book, "What It Is Like to Go to War," in 2011. The book weaves his personal recollectio

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Karl Marlantes

American writer (born 1944)

Karl Arthur Marlantes (born December 24, 1944) is an American author and Vietnam War veteran. He has written four books: Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (2010), What It Is Like to Go to War (2011), Deep River (2019), and Cold Victory (2024).

Biography

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Early life

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Marlantes grew up in Seaside, Oregon, a small, coastal logging town.^[3][4] He played football and was student body president at Seaside High School, from which he graduated in 1963.^[5] His father was the school principal.^[6]

He won a National Merit Scholarship and attended Yale University, where he was a member of Jonathan Edwards College and beta Theta Pi,^[7] and played as wing forward in the sport team.^[8] During his time at Yale, Marlantes trained in the Marine Corps Platoon Leaders Class.^[9] He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship at University College, Oxfo

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Karl Marlantes on Chronicling the Early Cold War Years

Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn, published in 2010 and based on his service as a much-decorated Marine during the Vietnam War, has become a wartime classic, linked with All Quiet on the Western Front. In Deep River, his second novel, Marlantes, whose maternal grandparents came from Finland, wrote about Finnish immigrants to the U.S. during the early years of the twentieth century.

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His new novel, Cold Victory, combines his visceral sense of wartime with a sophisticated awareness of Finnish culture and terrain and the complexities of postwar diplomacy and intelligence gathering in a country that was nearly absorbed into the Soviet Union. His narrative is crisp, empathetic, and highly visual, beginning with the opening lines: “She’d followed Arnie Koski a long way from Edmond, Oklahoma. Louise Koski was now standing on the open passenger deck of the Stockholm-Turku ferry as it