TOM CLAVIN is a bestselling author of 18 nonfiction books on American and military history, sports, and entertainment. He previously worked as a newspaper editor and reporter, including for the New York Times for 15 years, and as a writer for such magazines as Smithsonian and Men's Journal. He has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, and National Newspaper Association.
Five of his books have been New York Times best sellers: Dodge City, The Heart of Everything That Is, Halsey's Typhoon, The Last Stand of Fox Company, and, most recently, Blood and Treasure. Other recent titles that have received popular and critical acclaim include Tombstone, Valley Forge, Wild Bill, All Blood Runs Red, and the just-published Lightning Down: A World War II Story of Survival.
Tom lives in Sag Harbor, New York.
Published Works:
Follow Me to Hell
For release, April 2023.
The Uttermost Ends of the Earth
Another blockbuster book coming this fall!
The Last Hill
Another blockbuster book coming this April!
Lightning Down
On August 13, 1944, Joe Moser set off on his forty-fourth combat mission over occupied France. Soon, he would join almost 170 other Allied airmen as prisoners in Buchenwald, one of the most notorious and deadly of Nazi concentration camps. Tom Clavin's Lightning Down tells this largely untold and riveting true story.
Moser was just twenty-two years old, a farm boy from Washington State who fell in love with flying. During the War he realized his dream of piloting a P-38 Lightning, one of the most effective weapons the Army Air Corps had against the powerful German Luftwaffe. But on that hot August morning he had to bail out of his damaged, burning plane. Captured immediately, Moser's journey into hell began.
Moser and his courageous comrades from England, Canada, New Zealand, and elsewhere endured the most horrific conditions during their imprisonment... until the day the orders were issued by Hitler himself to execute them. Only a most desperate plan would save them.
The page-turning momentum of Lightning Down is like that of a thriller, but the stories of imprisoned and brutalized airmen are true and told in unforgettable detail, led by the distinctly American voice of Joe Moser, who prays every day to be reunited with his family.
Lightning Down is a can't-put-it-down inspiring saga of brave men confronting great evil and great odds against survival.
Published November 2021.
Blood and Treasure
It is the mid-eighteenth century, and in the thirteen colonies founded by Great Britain, anxious colonists desperate to conquer and settle North America's "First Frontier" beyond the Appalachian Mountains commence a series of bloody battles. These violent conflicts are waged against the Native American tribes whose lands they covet, the French, and the mother country itself in an American Revolution destined to reverberate around the world.
This is the setting of Blood and Treasure, and the guide to this epic narrative is America's first and arguably greatest pathfinder, Daniel Boone-not the coonskin cap-wearing caricature of popular culture but the flesh-and-blood frontiersman and Revolutionary War hero whose explorations into the forested frontier beyond the great mountains would become the stuff of legend. Now, thanks to painstaking research by two award-winning authors, the story of the brutal birth of the United States is told through the eyes of both the ordinary and larger-than-life men and women who witnessed it.
This fast-paced and fiery narrative, fueled by contemporary diaries and journals, newspaper reports, and eyewitness accounts, is a stirring chronicle of the conflict over America's "First Frontier" that places the reader at the center of this remarkable epoch and its gripping tales of courage and sacrifice.
Published April 2021.
Tombstone
On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, eight men clashed in what would be known as the most famous shootout in American frontier history. Thirty bullets were exchanged in 30 seconds, killing three men and wounding three others.
The fight sprang forth from a tense, hot summer. Cattle rustlers had been terrorizing the back country of Mexico and selling the livestock they stole to corrupt ranchers. The Mexican government built forts along the border to try to thwart American outlaws, while Arizona citizens became increasingly agitated. Rustlers, who became known as the cow-boys, began to kill each other as well as innocent citizens. That October, tensions boiled over with Ike and Billy Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury, and Billy Claiborne confronting the Tombstone marshal, Virgil Earp, and the suddenly deputized Wyatt and Morgan Earp and shotgun-toting Doc Holliday.
Best-selling author Tom Clavin peers behind decades of legend surrounding the story of Tombstone to reveal the true story of the drama and violence that made it famous. Tombstone also digs deep into the vendetta ride that followed the tragic gunfight, when Wyatt and Warren Earp and Holliday went vigilante to track down the likes of Johnny Ringo, Curly Bill Brocius, and other cowboys who had cowardly gunned down his brothers. That "vendetta ride" would make the myth of Wyatt Earp complete and punctuate the struggle for power in the American frontier's last boom town.
Published April 2020.
Promise
Promise is a collection of essays and observations by New York Times best-selling author Tom Clavin.
As Tom has recently said: "I have had the great good fortune to spend most of my life as a journalist, newspaper editor, and author of books. Those million-plus words were devoted to other people and events—some contemporary, many in other decades and centuries. Especially in recent years I have time-traveled and visited places I have never been and inhabited the minds of people I have never met. Telling stories of others has been thrilling and satisfying and I have managed to make a living doing it. In that part of my life, there are very few stones left un-turned. But there is territory closer to home that has mostly gone unexplored."
This book contains a great deal of that material that is "closer to home."
Published July 2020.
All Blood Runs Red
Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. The son of a former slave and an indigenous Creek woman, Bullard fled home at the age of eleven to escape the racial hostility of his Georgia community. When his journey led him to Europe, he garnered worldwide fame as a boxer, and later as the first African American fighter pilot in history.
After the war, Bullard returned to Paris a celebrated hero. But little did he know that the dramatic, globe-spanning arc of his life had just begun.
All Blood Runs Red is the inspiring untold story of an American hero, a thought-provoking chronicle of the twentieth century and a portrait of a man who came from nothing and by his own courage, determination, gumption, intelligence and luck forged a legendary life.
TOM CLAVIN is a bestselling author of 18 nonfiction books on American and military history, sports, and entertainment. He previously worked as a newspaper editor and reporter, including for the New York Times for 15 years, and as a writer for such magazines as Smithsonian and Men's Journal. He has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, and National Newspaper Association.
For release, April 2023.
Another blockbuster book coming this fall!
Another blockbuster book coming this April!
On August 13, 1944, Joe Moser set off on his forty-fourth combat mission over occupied France. Soon, he would join almost 170 other Allied airmen as prisoners in Buchenwald, one of the most notorious and deadly of Nazi concentration camps. Tom Clavin's Lightning Down tells this largely untold and riveting true story.
It is the mid-eighteenth century, and in the thirteen colonies founded by Great Britain, anxious colonists desperate to conquer and settle North America's "First Frontier" beyond the Appalachian Mountains commence a series of bloody battles. These violent conflicts are waged against the Native American tribes whose lands they covet, the French, and the mother country itself in an American Revolution destined to reverberate around the world.
On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, eight men clashed in what would be known as the most famous shootout in American frontier history. Thirty bullets were exchanged in 30 seconds, killing three men and wounding three others. 
Promise is a collection of essays and observations by New York Times best-selling author Tom Clavin.
Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. The son of a former slave and an indigenous Creek woman, Bullard fled home at the age of eleven to escape the racial hostility of his Georgia community. When his journey led him to Europe, he garnered worldwide fame as a boxer, and later as the first African American fighter pilot in history.
