Anthony Swofford

Following his time at the University of Iowa, Swofford served as an English professor at Lewis and Clark College, where he taught a class in the school's "Inventing America" program, and St. Mary's College of California, until he sold the film rights to Jarhead. Swofford has had articles, both fiction and non-fiction, published in The New York Times, Harper's, Men's Journal, The Iowa Review, and other publications. He is a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient and currently teaches creative writing at West Virginia University. His first fictional novel, Exit A, was published in January 2007. Exit A chronicles the life of a boy who grows up on an American Air Force Base in Japan and falls in love with the base general's daughter.

Swofford co-produced and narrated the 2006 documentary Semper Fi, is featured in Richard E. Robbins’s documentary Operation Homecoming, and has made appearances on several talk shows and in documentaries.

Swofford committed himself to writing in 1995, at the age of 24, and built on the encouragement he received at college to write Jarhead, which documents his time spent in the Gulf. In the book he portrays a grim view of life as a Marine, and indeed shows himself in a rather unflattering light. He said himself, "I could have written a flattering portrait of myself as a young Marine, but it would have been a much lesser book." Reviewing Jarhead for The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani said the book combined "the black humor of Catch-22 with the savagery of Full Metal Jacket and the visceral detail of The Things They Carried." In 2004, he received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir for Jarhead.

Anthony Swofford (born August 12, 1970) is an American writer and former U.S. Marine, best known for his 2003 book Jarhead, based heavily on his accounts of various situations encountered in the Persian Gulf War. This memoir was the basis of the 2005 film of the same name, directed by Sam Mendes.

Swofford was born on August 12, 1970, in Fairfield, California, into a military family. He grew up living on a military base. His father had served in the Vietnam War, and before that his grandfather had fought in World War II. In fact, he was conceived in Honolulu while his father was on a five-day break from fighting in the Vietnam War.