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JOHN'S TIMELINE
1943 - Born, Detroit, Michigan to Herb and Ruth Shannon
1945 - Herb returns from WWII, combat cameraman in Europe
1949 - Family moves to L.A., near downtown
1950 - Family moves permanently to San Pedro, L.A. Harbor, and father works as journalist.
1959-1961 - San Pedro High School
1961-1965 - Pomona College, Claremont, California
1965 - Married; divorced 1967
1965-1968 - UCLA Film School, MFA in screenwriting
1968-1970 - U.S. Peace Corps, Malawi, Central Africa, teacher
1972 - Publishes The Orphan, Saturday Review Press, a bildungsroman about being a Hippie in LA in the summer of 1968.
1973 - Lives in farm cottage in Ringmer, Sussex, writing and doing journalism.
1975 - Publishes Courage, Norton, a novel of revolution in Africa
1973-1979 - Political activist, anti-war movement, technical writer
1979 - Lives in London, amongst Southern African exiles, writing
1980-2001 - Educational film producer
1985 - Publishes Broken Codes, Pluto, London, a spy novel set in London in which there are no bad guys
1988 - Travels around the world, with long periods in Australia, South Africa, Britain.
1990 - Moves to Culver City, California
1992 - Founds John Brown Books and publishes The Taking of the Waters, a three-generation novel of the American Left
1996 - Publishes The Concrete River, the first Jack Liffey Book, through John Brown Books.
1998 - Berkley Prime Crime picks up The Concrete River.
1999 - Berkley publishes the second Jack Liffey, The Cracked Earth.
2000 - Berkley publishes the third Jack Liffey, The Poison Sky. Berkley drops all "hard-boiled" writers.
2001 - The fourth Jack Liffey, The Orange Curtain, moves to a hardcover edition, Carrol & Graf, an Otto Penzler Book.
2002 - The fifth Jack Liffey, Streets on Fire, published by Carrol & Graf/Otto Penzler.
2003 - The sixth Jack Liffey, City of Strangers, published by Carrol & Graf/Otto Penzler. Various Jack Liffey editions come out in England, Germany, France, and Japan.
2004-2005. Terminal Island and Dangerous Games also published by Carroll & Graf, until the publisher is destroyed by the collapse of their distributor.
2007. Moves to the new publisher Pegasus Books for The Dark Streets (working title was Koreatown), and Pegasus also begins reissuing trade paperbacks of the earlier Liffeys.
2008. Moves physically from Culver City, where he lived for 17 years, to Topanga, a hilly area just west of Santa Monica.
Copyright © John Shannon 2008. All rights reserved.