John Jakes

John Jakes was an American novelist best known for expansive historical sagas tracing families through periods of national transformation. Born in Chicago in 1932, he began selling stories while still a student and earned degrees from DePauw University and Ohio State University. He initially wrote science fiction, fantasy, mysteries and Westerns before achieving his greatest commercial success with historical fiction. Jakes died in Sarasota, Florida, in 2023 at the age of ninety.

Jakes’s eight-volume Kent Family Chronicles follows successive generations from the American Revolution through the Civil War and the late nineteenth century. His North and South trilogy centres on the Main and Hazard families, whose friendship is divided by the Civil War, while Homeland and American Dreams trace a German-American family through the social and industrial changes of the early twentieth century. Combining political events, warfare, romance and family conflict, his novels helped establish the multigenerational American historical saga as a major form of popular fiction.

Periods and events

Gilded Age America Emancipation and Reconstruction American Civil War World War I Air War Abolitionism and American Slavery American Revolutionary War American Revolutionary Era War of 1812 Old West and Frontier America Indian Wars of the American West

Series

Series by John Jakes (3 series)

The Kent Family Chronicles in Order

by John Jakes 8 books 4.2

The Kent Family Chronicles trace successive generations of one family from the eve of the American Revolution to the early 1890s. The saga begins with Phillipe Charboneau, the unrecognised son of an English duke, who becomes Philip Kent in America, and follows his descendants as they build, lose…

American Dreams

4.3

The North and South Trilogy in Order

by John Jakes 3 books 4.2

The North and South Trilogy follows the Mains of South Carolina and the Hazards of Pennsylvania, two families joined when Orry Main and George Hazard become friends at West Point. Their bond survives the Mexican–American War and years of sectional conflict, but slavery, secession and family pressure place…