Weaver of the Wheel
He built an age-spanning epic from memory, myth and moral choice, then left enough of its Pattern for trusted hands to carry the story home.
Novelist & Epic World-builder
Born in Charleston as James Oliver Rigney Jr., he served two tours with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, then earned a physics degree from The Citadel.
The soldier, engineer and voracious reader would later give his fantasy exact logistics, long memory and an unsentimental knowledge of violence.
He began writing in 1977, publishing historical fiction and Conan novels before undertaking a world large enough to hold cycles of myth.
Robert Jordan became the enduring pen name, separating the private Charlestonian from the public storyteller.
The Eye of the World opened with a deliberately familiar quest, then widened into a continent of competing histories, cultures and prophecies.
Across eleven novels, Jordan made the Pattern feel both destined and altered by every human choice.
After Knife of Dreams, Jordan was diagnosed with cardiac amyloidosis. He continued dictating scenes, recording answers and assembling notes for the conclusion.
He died on 16 September 2007. Harriet McDougal, his wife and editor, chose Brandon Sanderson to complete the story.
The planned ending became three books. Sanderson worked from Jordan’s outline, notes, dictated material and completed passages; Jordan remains the originating author and Sanderson the completing author.
A Memory of Light closed the main sequence in 2013 without disguising the collaboration that made its ending possible.
J. R. R. TolkienEpic fantasy built from language, myth and remembered history
George LucasA modern mythology shaped as a serial world
Joseph CampbellRecurring patterns of myth and transformation
