James Thackara was born in California to the Argentinean James Justin Thackara and Ellen Louise Schmid of Greenville, Texas. The parents' marriage broke down before their son’s birth and thereafter, Thackara and his mother moved through Europe and the Americas in search of the fabled early years she had known in Shanghai. At the age of eleven, he was sent to the first of several boarding schools. By the time he was thirteen, Thackara had attended eight schools, lived in five countries, and studied in four languages.His extended time in Rome from 1956 until 1971 occurred during Italy's film’s golden age, which was to have important implications.

As a Harvard University undergraduate (1967), Thackara gained an adoptive literary father in the writer Peter Taylor, then on Harvard’s faculty with Robert Lowell. Later, Thackara would visit his mentor yearly at Charlottesville or in Key West. This relationship extended the author’s acquaintance to many figures in American letters, including Lowell, John Hersey, John Casey and James Merrill. Rejected by the draft board in 1967, he left Harvard before his graduation ceremony to embark on a cut-rate quest around the world.

In London from 1967 to 1971, Thackara wrote two novels, a book of philosophy and a study of a no-growth economy, nature preservation, and wars between the sexes over reproductive laboratories; but he did not submit them for publication. From the mid 1970s, Thackara’s thwarted attempts to find a publisher were having an ever more negative effect on his finances. After the fall of Chile’s democratically elected Salvador Allende and the spread of assassinations by Latin American dictators, Thackara developed contacts with human rights activists who were working with solidarity movements across the continent. He also supported the small advocacy against Soviet psychiatric abuse (CAPA) and was involved with policies at Index on Censorship. Moreover, he began a lifelong involvement with nuclear-security ethics and practice that would inspire later interventions and the artistic interest of other authors.

Thackara's artistic treatment of the nuclear frontier had been explored in several literary forms, including film and novel. The result, America’s Children, was eventually signed on for publication in 1984 by Mike Petty at Chatto and Windus. Following this dark picture of a headlong rush to thermonuclear weaponry, the lyrical celebration of a young girl’s passage to sober maturity in Ahab’s Daughter was published by Mike Petty at Abacus in 1989.

Since 1977, Thackara had put the first draft of The Book of Kings through twelve rewrites, the final version coming in at 1470 pages. In 1989, the agent Anthony Shiel agreed to represent The Book of Kings, and a lucrative deal was struck with the Bantam Press in London. An external editor was hired to monitor the shortening by a further fifth in line with the author’s earlier decision and now expected by the publisher. The history of the book, of the dissolution of this contract even after the publisher replaced the external editor with Mike Petty and the long struggle toward publication, were examined in John Walsh’s extensive author profile in The New Yorker.

After intervention by the agent Ed Victor, the book was eventually published by the American publisher Peter Mayer at Overlook Press (1999), and received enormous attention, including extravagant praise and mixed reviews in the U.S.,

and in the UK.
It also appeared in  the Spanish language countries

and Italy where critics were more accepting of the book's artistic ambition than were the English speaking critics.

America’s Children

Thackara’s first published work (Chatto & Windus 1984), republished by Overlook in the US in 2003 contains defining characteristics of his later work: a search to reveal everyman’s moral responsibility; tales that extract myths . from shared history and the use of language as a cipher of plot and emotional change. The author describes the book in a brief note as a "chronicle novel...the narrative is a poetic invention while the details of events are widely known".The work tells the tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his leadership of the team of scientists who developed the atomic bomb from a hidden site in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The tale traces Oppenheimer from his days as a young, brilliant scientist to his astute recruitment by General Leslie Groves to head up the team of scientists drawn from around the world including some refugees from Hitler's Germany. Imbued by Thackara with currents of Faust and Prometheus,

Oppenheimer is caught in the most extreme of contradictions. Armed with pure reason, he seeks out the power of gods to impose justice, despite his awareness of the potential for limitless violence, for the elimination of God, and for the denial of human responsibility. The book follows the development of the bomb in the unspoiled Indian country of the American southwest, its first test, and then its use in Hiroshima. His attempt to save his conscience ends with his betrayal by Edward Teller, his former protégé on the Los Alamos team. The hero meets a tragic downfall when he is implicated as a possible Soviet spy and denied further security clearance. Oppenheimer is rejected by the American government he empowered and witnesses the deployment of the thermonuclear weapons he had sacrificed his reputation as an advisor to oppose. Thackara subsumes scientific mysteries in a poetic vision of an extremely well documented world which is treated as a meditational poem. This work precedes the publication of Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun but is still accurate in all critical details, including actual quotations from the protagonists. Thackara's treatment of this technically daunting and historically apocalyptic event through the prism of art and morality was later echoed on the stage by Michael Frayn's play concerning the enigmatic Bohr Heisenberg meeting and in opera by John Adams's musical setting of the nuclear dawn.

Ahab’s Daughter

Here, Thackara departs from his portrait of cataclysmic male ambition to explore the female principle in its powers of enchantment and destruction. In a metaphor of Troy's Helen, Kate Cooper, the protected 18 year old daughter of Cape Cod puritans, is trapped by the Cyprus crisis of 1974 on a Greek island. Marooned by her innocence, she is exposed to decadence as a set of yacht-bound dissolutes toy with her romantic freshness and the island citizens expose truths of her country’s politics. Amidst this potion of alien influences, Kate releases her capacity for love and has her trust exposed by a distant cousin, Mark. In scenes of lyric eroticism, while the major powers prepare for war, the terrors of unlimited passion emerge. Ahab's Daughter presents Thackara’s art in its most poetic simplicity.

The Book of Kings

In his most recently published book (Overlook, 1999, Duckworth, 1999, Baldini & Castoldi, 2001, Espasa Calpe, 2001) Thackara traces the ways in which four Paris university students of widely varied origin come to share student accommodations in the Rue de Fleurus in the early 1930s. Despite, or perhaps because of their clash of class, politics, and wealth, they embrace the adventure of progressive enlightenment in the cultural capital of Europe. United by their youthful aspirations, Justin Lothaire, the half-Arab scholarship boy from an Algiers slum, David von Sunda, from Bavaria’s high aristocracy, Johannes Godard, a highly-strung German philosophy prodigy whose idealism clashes with the dark mood of the times, and Duncan Penn, the complete mid-Atlantic American, seem to create an enduring balance. They are soon joined by a pivotal figure, Eli Hebron, a Jewish Communist. Through him, Justin will later be in at the start of the Spanish Civil War and enter a problematic association with the Comintern agent Peter Tiolchak. As war envelopes Europe, the fraternity and the women they love are exposed to the century’s cruellest forces. Through numerous transmutations of character and plot and scenes of military carnage, Europe’s civilization is seized by crazed ideologues; Justin emerges a literary hero in France’s Resistance where the first consciousness of Jewish exterminations comes to him through his fellow partisan Joseph Mendel. Meanwhile, David is swept up in the invasion of Joseph Stalin’s Russia and subsequently deserts. Johannes becomes an idiot of high philosophy in Goebbels’ propaganda ministry and is destroyed by his sexual obsession with a Wagnerian soprano while Duncan Penn returns in search of his friends as part of Europe’s liberation, only to die in the last hours of Hitler’s reign. As the yet unassimilated fact of the Shoah and the slaughter of many further millions become clear, the authority of love stays central amongst the defining female characters, Helene le Treve idolized by both Justin, and her childhood friend Luz Holti, betrothed to David but ultimately marrying Justin.

Thackara’s work has received notable extremes of criticism

and praise though not in equal measure and sometimes the negative critiques have been commented on. The basis of some  disapproval of Thackara is that his language can become inhumanly exalted; his characters’ metaphysical conjectures weigh down the text; and the sprinkling of different languages requires a skill not found in most readers. On the positive side, he receives respect for his concern with big issues. and mastery in encompassing the entire world in his canvas.

Several critics in the UK and the US have compared Thackara to the literary giants Tolstoy and Mann whilst noting that if Tolstoy portrayed two countries, Thackara moves across four continents and ten countries. In its scope, The Book of Kings has also been compared to the books of American authors Herman Wouk and Irwin Shaw but it is distinct from them for its plumbing of metaphysical questions. Various aspects of his art receive particular praise, such as the orchestrated horror of war scenes, Critics also define his writing for his drive to articulate global events through human responsibility.

Thackara’s voice speaks from deep in the psychology of his characters and would suggest the Russian writers in his depiction of characters seeking a design amidst chaos of political injustice and private conscience. The author's analysis of the degradation wrought by Hitler’s rise to power could trace its origins in Dostoyevsky's urban deliriums of poverty and class and confidence in the redemptive powers of beauty and love. As a modern, however, Thackara’s use of the plot and characters from the Old Testament's KINGS and SAMUEL in The Book of Kings is similar to James Joyce’s use of the structure of the Odyssey in portraying Dublin.

All of Thackara's works invoke the sacrament of the soil, placing him in the American tradition of nature writers. the Aegean of the gods in Ahab’s Daughter, the Sahara, Steppes and Amazonian jungle of The Book of Kings are used to release the subliminal, summon prophetic plot influences, or trigger metamorphosis in a character.

Artistic energy in Thackara’s confrontations with the blackest of contemporary subjects comes from his storytelling where characters exemplify classical mysteries or instances of destiny and history". In each book, his system of problem and resolution enlists a tapestry of cultures, the interstices of history and the legacy of ideas to construct overarching parable as accessible to any reader as niche ethnic or even national sagas.