John Saul was born in Pasadena, California on February 25, 1942, and grew up in Whittier where he graduated from high school in 1959. He moved around a lot during college, going from California, to Montana, and Ohio colleges, majoring in anthropology, liberal arts, and theater. He never obtained a degree.
After leaving college, he took up writing, deciding that it was a fitting career for a college dropout, and he worked at various odd jobs to support himself while developing his skill as a writer.
He wrote several manuscripts that didn’t find much success, but in 1976 he was approached by Dell and asked to write a psychological thriller. He was happy to oblige and wrote Suffer the Children within a staggering 30 day period. It appeared on the best seller lists, even hitting #1 in Canada. All of his subsequent books have been best sellers and have been published world wide.
John resides in the Pacific Northwest, living in Seattle and the San Juan Islands, and also has a residence in Hawaii.
In addition to his novels, he also writes plays, acts in theater, and is a Vice President of The Chester Woodruff Foundation (New York), a philanthropic organization. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Northwest Writers Conference.
Biographical introduction "Who Scott Thinks He Is" and promotional material all gratefully borrowed, with permission, from Scott Nicholson's Web site: 
Mort Castle is an American horror author and writing teacher, with a dozen books, novels, and collections, as well as hundreds of short stories to his credit. He contributed to How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction by J.N. Williamson, served as editor of both Writing Horror: A Handbook By the Horror Writers Association and the updated and revised On Writing Horror. He is a founding member of the Horror Writer’s Association. He has been (and is) a musician, stand up comedian, high school English teacher, a magazine and comic book editor, and a mentor, and teaches in the fiction writing department of Columbia College Chicago in the largest college writing program in the nation. He is a Bram Stoker Award nominee (six times), and has been nominated for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for the collection, Moon on the Water. In 2000, The Star / Chicago Sun-Times Newspaper Group named him as one of “21 Leaders in the Arts for the 21st Century in Chicago.” Along with Gary Braunbeck, Gemma Files, and Cody Goodfellow, Castle is one of the four authors in the forthcoming Dark Arts anthology Mighty Unclean, the deluxe edition of the comics formatted book he edited and produced. J N Williamson’s MASQUES will be released in May, and there’s a new collection of stories announced from Full Moon Press for 2009, entitled New Moon on the Water. The Polish edition of Newsweek cited two of Castle’s books as the “best published in Poland in 2008.”
