David Perry

David C. Perry reported to the United States Naval Academy in 1977, where he first encountered the discipline and brotherhood that would define both his naval career and, decades later, his fiction. His service carried him across the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific aboard the steel ships of a modern navy — an apprenticeship in seamanship that informs every page he writes about the navy's earliest days.

That grounding became the foundation of the Not Self But Country series, five novels tracing the founding of the Continental Navy and Marine Corps through the men who built them: John Paul Jones, Captain John Barry, and Christopher Raymond Perry among them. Each book is built on meticulous research — ship's logs, period correspondence, family records, and the historical record of the Revolution itself — in service of a single aim: placing the reader on the quarterdeck, not in the lecture hall.

David also writes for younger readers, and explores questions of liberty and self-governance in a near-future setting in the Al-Unidos Liberation Chronicles. He lives in Liberty Lake, Washington, with his wife, Bonnie, where research, writing, and a stubbornly serious vegetable garden compete for his attention in roughly equal measure.

His work has been praised by retired Navy and Marine Corps flag officers for its historical accuracy and authentic command of period seafaring language.