Stephen Coonts (born July 19, 1946) is an American thriller and suspense novelist.

Coonts grew up in Buckhannon, West Virginia, a small coal-mining town [1] and earned an B.A. degree in political science at West Virginia University in 1968. He entered the Navy the following year and flew an A-6 Intruder medium attack plane during the Vietnam War, where he served on two combat cruises aboard the USS Enterprise . He accumulated 1600 hours in the A-6 Intruder and earned a number of Navy commendations, including the Distinguished Flying Cross. (His navigator-bombardier was LTjg Stanley W. Bryant who later became a Rear Admiral and deputy commander-in-chief of the US naval forces in Europe.)

After the war Coonts served as a flight instructor for A-6 aircraft for two years, then did a tour as an assistant catapult and arresting gear officer aboard USS Nimitz . After being honorably discharged from duty as a lieutenant in 1977, Coonts pursued a Juris Doctor degree at the University of Colorado, graduating in 1979. He then worked as a lawyer for several oil and gas companies, pursuing his writing interests in his free time.

Coonts published short stories in a number of publications before writing Flight of the Intruder in 1986. That book, based in part on his experiences as an A-6 pilot during the Vietnam War, spent 28 weeks on the New York Times bestseller lists, and later (1991) was made into a movie. This launched his career as a novelist, and he continued writing adventure-thrillers, most of them based on the main character from his first book, Jake Grafton. Coonts has also written several other series and stand-alone novels, but is best known for the Grafton books.

Today Coonts continues to write, having had seventeen New York Times bestsellers (out of 20 books). He lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son, Brandon.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Stephen Coonts", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0