Tom Franklin (author)

Thomas Gerald Franklin (born July 7, 1963) is an American writer originally from Dickinson, Alabama, United States, "a town of around 500 people in south central Alabama, near Monroeville, home of To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee". In a recent interview, Franklin reveals the role imagination played during his younger years as he grew up "playing with G. I. Joes and imagining their lives. Building sci-fi forts from cardboard boxes and bricks, drawing control panels on the walls, etc. I liked creating the forts more than I did playing in them. There was something wonderful about making something tangible, something others could see, participate in. Then I moved to drawing my own comic books. I loved comic books–Marvel, DC. I collected them and had a couple of thousand of them. I drew one sci-fi comic book (a rip-off of Space 1999 and BattleStar Galactica) that numbered up to like 24 or 25. I was serious about it. Then I started writing barbarian stories. I loved Tarzan and Conan the Barbarian and so wrote a lot of bad imitations of those." Franklin was a marginal student; for example, in high school, he characterized himself as a "C student. Instead of reading Romeo and Juliet, I was reading Stephen King. I hated math, [and] failed algebra twice."