Mary Doria Russell

Mary Doria Russell (born August 19, 1950) is a retired American novelist. She is best known for her work, The Sparrow, and its sequel, Children of God, about a Jesuit priest who travels to a faraway planet.

Personal life Russell was born in Elmhurst, Illinois, outside of Chicago. with her mother a Navy nurse, and her father a drill sergeant in the Marine Corps. She graduated from Glenbard East High School in Lombard, Illinois. She met her husband, Don, there, as a freshman. On her ultimate decision to leave the church, Russell has said, "I simply do not believe in the divinity of Jesus. Eventually, I found a spiritual home in the religion Jesus practiced."

Russell celebrates Jewish holidays like Passover and Hanukkah. She keeps a kosher diet.

As an anthropologist, she has worked at Case Western Reserve University and as a forensic consultant for law enforcement agencies. After Case Western cut her department, Russell went to work for Picker International, where she wrote manuals for Magnetic Resonance scanners. She worked as a freelance technical writer for five years.

Dreamers of the Day (Random House, 2008) is a historical romance set in the Midwestern United States and the Middle East during the aftermath of the First World War and the Great Influenza. It focuses on the 1921 Cairo Conference, when Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and a group of British oilmen invented the modern Middle East, thus setting the region up for a hundred years of war.

Doc (Random House 2011) is a murder mystery as well as a compassionate portrait of the notorious "gambler and gunman" known as Doc Holliday. Doc is set in Dodge City, Kansas, during 1878, the last year that Dr. John Henry Holliday's tuberculosis was in check long enough for him to practice dentistry. It was the American Library Association's Top Pick in Historical Fiction as well as the Kansas State Library's Notable Novel and the Great Lakes Great Reads pick.

Epitaph (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015) picks up where Doc left off, following Holliday and the Earp brothers to Tombstone, Arizona, and traces the political and social roots of the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, as well as the making of the mythology that surrounds it. While researching the book, the 60-year-old Russell rode 58 miles on horseback through the mountains surrounding Tombstone, retracing the Earp Vendetta Ride. The novel was called the best ever written on the subject by Earp biographer Allen Barra and was recognized by True West Magazine as the Best Historical Western of 2015. The Ohioana Library Foundation awarded it the Best Fiction Prize of 2016; it also won the Ohioana Readers Choice Award for the year.

The Women of the Copper Country (Atria Books, 2019) is a novel about the Copper Country strike of 1913–1914, the first unionized strike against all the copper mines in the Copper Country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The central character, "Big Annie" Clements, is based on "America's Joan of Arc," Anna Clemenc, who founded the Women's Auxiliary of the Western Federation of Miners and proudly carried the flag in many marches against the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company. The book received a Michigan Notable Book Award for 2020 from the Library of Michigan.

Russell is active on the lecture circuit, speaking at colleges, universities and libraries.

Books The Sparrow (Villard, 1996; Ballantine, 1997) Children of God (Villard, 1998; Ballantine, 1999) A Thread of Grace (Random House, 2005; Ballantine, 2006) Dreamers of the Day (Random House, 2008; Ballantine 2009) Doc (Random House 2011; Ballantine, 2012) Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015 hc, 2016 tradepaper) The Women of the Copper Country: A Novel (Atria Books, 2019 hc, 2020 tradepaper)

Awards James Tiptree, Jr. Award, 1997, The Sparrow