John Martin

John Martin is the son of a FDNY captain and the first person in his family to go to college. He was born in the Bronx and lived on St. Ann’s Ave., a few blocks from Yankee Stadium. He moved to the South Shore of Long Island when he was five and grew up on a dead-end street linked to a canal that opened into the Atlantic bays, where he spent his youth fishing, crabbing, and bouncing a ball in the driveway.

After graduating from the University of Rochester he rented a house with a professor and two other students, forming an intellectual community that revolved around philosophy, poetry, and the general mayhem that accompanies the soul’s hunt for itself. To earn a living he worked as a laborer, dock hand, roofer, and printer.

He worked seven years as a machinist in South Boston and Beantown environs and in Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Oakland—machining computer housings along Boston’s Route 128, machining components for motion-picture cameras on Manhattan’s West Side, remachining sewing machine parts for garment district manufacturers in a Chelsea shop, high-speed machining aerospace parts in Oakland, and building gadgets for professors’ experiments in a West Village machine shop off Washington Square that served the NYU Chemistry and Physics departments.

While a machinist in Southie he was a union organizer for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). He has been a member of the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers (IAM), the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), and District 65 (now UAW).

He left the factory floor to become a photojournalist at McGraw-Hill. He left there to freelance for The Economist and magazines in Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States. He drafted a novel years ago and turned down a contract from the literary agent who went on to represent John Grisham. Oh well ...

LOST SOURCE is the first book he has published.