Robert Jordan

Robert Jordan was the pen name of James Oliver Rigney Jr. (1948 to 2007), an American fantasy writer who created The Wheel of Time, a 14-volume epic that began with The Eye of the World in 1990 and has sold about 90 million copies.

He was born on 17 October 1948 in Charleston, South Carolina, and died there on 16 September 2007, aged 58, from cardiac amyloidosis. He served two tours in Vietnam as a helicopter gunner from 1968 to 1970, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross with oak leaf cluster and the Bronze Star with "V" device. He then studied physics at The Citadel, graduating in 1974, and worked as a nuclear engineer for the US Navy before turning to writing after a knee injury in 1977.

His early books included the Fallon novels under the name Reagan O'Neal, starting with The Fallon Blood (1980), and seven Conan the Barbarian novels written between 1982 and 1984. The Eye of the World was published by Tor Books on 15 January 1990 as a large-format paperback, launching The Wheel of Time. He wrote eleven main volumes and the prequel New Spring before his death, leaving notes so the series could be finished; Brandon Sanderson completed it in three volumes from 2009 to 2013, ending with A Memory of Light.

For collectors. The Eye of the World was first released by Tor in the United States on 15 January 1990 as a large-format paperback, and Wikipedia's first-printing list also records a St. Martin's Press hardcover of the same date; Orbit published it in the UK. Later reissues added a new prologue, "Ravens", and in 2002 the book was split into two young adult volumes, From the Two Rivers and To the Blight, so check which text a copy carries.