Richard Snow spent nearly four decades at American Heritage magazine, serving as editor in chief for seventeen years, and has been a consultant on historical motion pictures, among them Glory, and has written for documentaries, including the Burns brothers’ Civil War, and Ric Burns’s award-winning PBS film Coney Island, whose screenplay he wrote. He is the author of multiple books, including, most recently, Disney’s Land.
"""Richard Snow has brought forth the literary equivalent of a perfect storm in which nineteenth-century adventure, true crime, and high drama on the high seas all come together in the hands of a master storyteller operating at the height of his considerable powers. Sailing the Graveyard Sea braids the poetic force of Herman Melville with the narrative flair of Patrick O’Brian to create a dark, tightly strung, and deeply unsettling chapter in the saga of the United States Navy. A masterpiece of maritime history lifted straight from the gun decks of an American brig-of-war in the great age of sail.""—Kevin Fedarko, author of The Emerald Mile ""As engrossing as Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea. In Richard Snow’s masterful hands, the collision between a brash, young, wannabe pirate and his rash, too-proud, unyielding commanding officer is a sea story for the ages. What happened on Somers during a routine U.S. Navy voyage in 1842 is as shocking and unsettling today as it was in its day."" —James Sullivan, author of Unsinkable: Five Men and the Indomitable Run of the USS Plunkett “First Snow’s watershed New York Times book review revived Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels for a new generation; now he delivers a masterful account of one of the most intriguing episodes of U.S. Naval history. The moral questions raised by the Somers mutiny echo through the ages—but never so profoundly, or with such intensity, as in Sailing the Graveyard Sea.” —Dean King, nationally bestselling author of Skeletons on the Zahara and A Sea of Words"