John Sandford, real name John Roswell Camp is an American novelist and former journalist. Camp was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He received a Bachelor's in American History and a Master's in Journalism from the University of Iowa. From 1971 to 1978, Camp wrote for The Miami Herald. In 1978 he moved to Minneapolis and started writing for The Saint Paul Pioneer Press as a features reporter; in 1980 he became a daily columnist. That year he was a Pulitzer finalist for a series of stories on Native American culture. In 1985, during the Midwest farm crisis, he wrote a series entitled "Life on the Land: an American farm family", which followed a typical southwest Minnesota farm family through the course of a full year. For that work he won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award for Non-Deadline Feature Writing. He worked part-time at the Pioneer Press in 1989 and left the next year. 

February 23rd, 1944 in Cedar Rapids (Age 80)