David Perry Snelling was born on a 16-below-zero day in Chicago after World War II. He was raised near Los Angeles, running
barefoot through the orange groves during his summers in the 1950s.
A graduate of Long Beach State, where he was the editor of the daily campus newspaper, he studied journalism and history. As
a reporter and editor he observed and absorbed events as history was being made, starting in the turbulent '60s. He worked on
three metropolitcan newspapers and covered natural disasters, law enforcement, government, politics, presidents and foreign
leaders. He has traveled abroad extensively and lived for a time in Switzerland.
As he grew up, he was surrounded by a large extended family of Swedish aunts and uncles. His desire to understand why his
great grandparents left Sweden in 1879 led to his latest novel, The Wedding Shoes.
Married with two grown children, he splits his time between homes near San Diego and on Camano Island north of Seattle.
His previous novel, Dateline, about an inheritance struggle within a wealthy newspaper family, was released in 2012.
