The award winning author of ten books and dozens of stories in national magazines, Dean King has a deep and abiding passion for historical and adventure narratives. His earliest works--A Sea of Words, Harbors and High Seas, and Every Man Will Do His Duty--are companion books to Patrick O'Brian's monumental Aubry-Maturin novel series and are the first and most popular companion books to the 20-novel series. King wrote a groundbreaking biography of O'Brian, published just three month's after O'Brian's death in Dublin. Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed (Holt, 2000)was excerpted in four full pages in The Daily Telegraph and was named a book of the year by the Telegraph. King appeared in a BBC documentary about O'Brian and on ABC World News Tonight and NPR's Talk of the Nation.
King followed this biography with the national bestseller Skeletons on the Zahara (Little, Brown, 2004), which tells the true story of the shipwreck of a Connecticut merchant brig Commerce on the west coast of Africa in 1815. The crew was enslaved on the desert by nomadic Arabs and had to travel 800 miles across the Sahara to reach freedom. Based on the memoirs of Captain James Riley and sailor Archibald Robbins, which King discovered in the New York Yacht Club library, and translated into ten languages, Skeletons was a multiple book of the year selection, the basis of a feature in National Geographic Adventure and a two-hour special documentary on the History Chanel. It is currently being developed as a feature film in London.
King's latest work, Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival , about the 30 courageous women who walked 4,000 miles across China with Mao Zedong, in 1934, was published in the spring of 2010. While crossing eleven provinces, the 30 women forded dozens of raging rivers, scaled ice-covered peaks on the Tibetan Plateau, and survived ambushes, bombings, severe hunger and thirst, typhoid fever, and the births of half a dozen children. Their epic march helped reshape China forever. King's account of his research trek in northwest Sichuan Province is featured in the April edition of Outside and, translated into Mandarin, is the cover story of the May edition of Outside China. Of Unbound, Mary Baldwin College professor of Asian Studies Daniel A. Metraux wrote: “King, more than any other writer, recaptures the drama and flavor of this momentous time in Chinese history. . . . Unbound is a must read for any student of modern Chinese history and ranks with Red Star Over China as one of the classic narratives of the early days of the CCP.”
King is a past director of book publishing at National Review, an original contributing editor to Men's Journal, and the founder of Bubba Magazine. He has contributed stories to Book Marks, Esquire, Men's Journal, National Geographic Adventure, New York, The New York Times, Outside, Travel + Leisure, and The Daily Telegraph.
From 1997-2000, King edited the Heart of Oak Sea Classics series published by Henry Holt, which included fiction and non-fiction books about the Age of Fighting Sail, with new introductions and annotation. The series included such authors as Joseph Conrad, James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Marryat, and James Norman Hall. Captain Richard Bailey of HMS Rose once noted that: “Like a great explorer of nautical literary archeology, King leads us on a journey of rediscovery into the past – back to a time before O'Brian, before Forester – to the founding authors of a great literary tradition.”
King is a nationally known speaker on his books, writing, and sea literature.