Stephen Hunter

Hunter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. His father was Charles Francis Hunter, a Northwestern University speech professor who was killed in 1975. His mother was Virginia Ricker Hunter, a writer of children\'s books. After graduating from Northwestern in 1968 with a degree in journalism, he was drafted for two years into the United States Army serving in The Old Guard (3rd Infantry Regiment) in Washington, D.C., a unit that has both operational and ceremonial missions, the latter most notably being the guard force for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He also wrote for a military paper, the Pentagon News.\n', '

He joined The Baltimore Sun in 1971, working at the copy desk of the newspaper\'s Sunday edition for a decade. He became its film critic in 1982, a post he held until moving to The Washington Post in the same function in 1997. In 1998 Hunter wo…