avg_rating: 4.08
name: William E.  Wallace
about: Author William E. Wallace grew up in an eight-by-thirty-five-foot Kitt trailer house, the son of working class parents who followed jobs all over the Western United States. He got his public education in Vallejo, Pollock Pines, Vacaville, Sacramento, Placerville, Monterey and Tracy, California, and in Denver, Derby, Rifle and Grand Junction Colorado. As a child he was surrounded by his parents' true crime pulps and paperback novels and became an avid reader of pulp fiction and adventure comics who collected his first rejection slips for stories he submitted to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Astounding, Amazing Stories and Fantastic as a high school student.He served as a linguist and intelligence analyst in the U.S. Navy durin Author William E. Wallace grew up in an eight-by-thirty-five-foot Kitt trailer house, the son of working class parents who followed jobs all over the Western United States. He got his public education in Vallejo, Pollock Pines, Vacaville, Sacramento, Placerville, Monterey and Tracy, California, and in Denver, Derby, Rifle and Grand Junction Colorado. As a child he was surrounded by his parents' true crime pulps and paperback novels and became an avid reader of pulp fiction and adventure comics who collected his first rejection slips for stories he submitted to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Astounding, Amazing Stories and Fantastic as a high school student.He served as a linguist and intelligence analyst in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War and took his bachelor's degree in political science at Cal Berkeley after being discharged from the military in 1971.After graduation, Wallace supported himself as a broiler cook while writing for two "alternative" newspapers, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Berkeley Barb. He also freelanced for seven years, during which time he wrote stories about gangsters, prison gangs, corrupt union officials and similar topics for two of the last pulp magazines published in the U.S.: Saga and Argosy.While struggling to survive as a writer, Wallace spent a year as an investigator for a law firm in San Francisco. He jokes that he honed his man-hunting skills by tracking down the firm's blue-collar clients, many of whom had a tendency to move whenever they got behind in rent or alimony payments.In 1980 he was hired by the San Francisco Chronicle and wrote for the paper for 26 years before taking early retirement in 2006. At The Chronicle he covered such topics as political corruption, organized crime and police misconduct. His investigative reports won multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the San Francisco Press Club.Since his retirement, Wallace taught journalism at California State University, East Bay in Hayward and at the University of California, Berkeley.Today he works as a full-time author and lives with his wife and son in Berkeley, California. ...more