John W. Harding

John W. Harding was born and raised under the sign of Hollywood. An award-winning entertainment writer, his reviews and features have been published in the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun. For several years he was a fulltime arts editor for Times-Mirror and the Tribune Company before leaving in 2012 to write his own series of novels about early filmmaking.

"As a storyteller, two things in particular interest me about the early movie-makers," he says. "The first is their innocence, and the second is their corruption."

"The Designated Virgin" is about the first battle over movie censorship in 1909. "The Ben-Hur Murders" shows how Prohibition opened Hollywood's back gates to a criminal underworld, even as studio moguls were busy erecting the edifice of a magnificent "Dream Factory."

While many of the characters and episodes in his books are fictional, the backgrounds remain faithful to facts gleaned from research into primary documents, letters and other archived materials.

John lives in Maryland with his wife.