Douglas Kennedy was born in New York City in 1955. He attended the Collegiate School at Trinity College in Dublin, and graduated magna cum laude from Bowdoin College in 1976. Kennedy worked briefly as a journalist in Maine and as a stage manager in New York. In 1978, he traveled to Ireland for a two-week visit and ended up staying there, living in Dublin for the next 11 years. It was at this time that Kennedy began to write in his spare time, and five years later, he turned his attention to writing full-time. Kennedy first supported himself as a playwright. His early radio plays, Shakespeare on Five Dollars a Day and The Don Giovanni Blues, were broadcast by the BBC. Kennedy's first book,… Beyond the Pyramids, was published in London in 1988. In the next few years, Kennedy went on to write two more travelogues and the novel The Dead Heart, none of which were ever published in the United States. It wasn't until 1997 that one of Kennedy's books made an American debut. The book, The Big Picture, focuses on a suburban yuppie lawyer who throws his life away with one sudden act of violence. A selection of the Literary Guild and the Doubleday Book Club, film rights have been optioned by Fox 2000 and foreign rights have been sold in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Norway, and Spain. In addition to his books, Douglas Kennedy is a much-published journalist whose work regularly appears in such London publications as The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, British GQ, and Arena.