Jack Vance

Early family records were apparently destroyed in the fire following the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

Vance's maternal grandfather, L. M. (Ludwig Mathias) Hoefler, was a successful lawyer in San Francisco.

Vance grew up in the family's large house in San Francisco on Filbert Street.

When Vance's father left the family to live on his ranch in Mexico, the family's house in San Francisco was rented out to the father's sister.

With the separation of his parents, and the loss of use of the San Francisco house, Vance's mother moved him and his siblings to their maternal grandfather's California ranch near Oakley in the delta of the Sacramento River.

This setting formed Vance's love of the outdoors, and allowed him time to indulge his passion as an avid reader of his mother's large book collection, which included Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes and his Barsoom novels and Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island.

When Vance explored the nearby town, he started reading pulp fiction magazines at the local drugstore.

With the death of his grandfather, who supported the family, which coincided with the economic challenges of Great Depression, the Vance family’s fortune dwindled, and Vance was forced to leave junior college and work to support himself, assisting his mother when able.

Vance plied many trades for short stretches: as a bellhop (a "miserable year"), in a cannery, and on a gold dredge.

Vance described this era as a time of personal change: “Over a span of four or five years, I developed from an impractical little intellectual into a rather reckless young man, competent at many skills and crafts, and determined to try every phase of life.”

He subsequently entered the University of California, Berkeley, and over the next six years studied mining engineering, physics, journalism, and English.

Vance wrote one of his first science fiction stories for an English class assignment: his professor commented in a scornful tone, "We also have a piece of science fiction"—Vance's first negative review.

He worked as an electrician in the naval shipyards at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, being paid "56¢ an hour," and worked for a time as part of a degaussing crew.

The attack on Pearl Harbor took place about a month after he resigned his employment there.

John Holbrook Vance (August 28, 1916 – May 26, 2013) was an American mystery, fantasy, and science fiction writer.

Though most of his work has been published under the name Jack Vance, he also wrote several mystery novels under pen names, including Ellery Queen.

Vance began trying to become a professional writer in the late 1940s, as part of the San Francisco Renaissance, a movement of experimentation in literature and the arts.

His first lucrative sale was one of the early Magnus Ridolph stories to Twentieth Century Fox, who also hired him as a screenwriter for the Captain Video television series.

Vance graduated in 1942.

Weak eyesight prevented military service.

He found a job as a rigger at the Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, California, and enrolled in an Army Intelligence program to learn Japanese, but Washed Out.

In 1943, he memorized an eye chart and became an able seaman in the Merchant Marine.

In later years, boating remained his favorite recreation; boats and voyages are a frequent motif in his work.

and the Edgar Award in 1961 for the best first mystery novel for The Man in the Cage.

His first publications were stories in science fiction magazines.

As he became well known, he published novellas and novels, many of which were translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, Italian and German.

His most notable awards included Hugo Awards in 1963 for The Dragon Masters, in 1967 for The Last Castle, and in 2010 for his memoir This Is Me, Jack Vance!; the Nebula Award in 1966, also for The Last Castle; the Jupiter Award in 1975 and the World Fantasy Award in 1990 for Lyonesse: Madouc.

He worked as a seaman, a rigger, a surveyor, a ceramicist, and a carpenter before he established himself fully as a writer, which did not occur until the 1970s.

From his youth, Vance had been fascinated by Dixieland and traditional jazz.

He was an amateur of the cornet and ukulele, often accompanying himself with a kazoo, and was a competent harmonica player.

His first published writings were jazz reviews for The Daily Californian (his college paper), and music is an element in many of his works.

Vance won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1984, and he was a Guest of Honor at the 1992 World Science Fiction Convention in Orlando, Florida.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made him its 15th Grand Master in 1997, and the Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted him in 2001, its sixth class of two deceased and two living writers.

In 1946, Vance met and married Norma Genevieve Ingold (died March 25, 2008), another Cal student.

Vance continued to live in Oakland, in a house he built and extended with his family over the years, including a hand-carved wooden ceiling from Kashmir.

The Vances had extensive travels, including one around-the-world voyage, and often spent several months at a time living in places like Ireland, Tahiti, South Africa, Positano (in Italy) and on a houseboat on Lake Nagin in Kashmir.

A 2009 profile in The New York Times Magazine described Vance as "one of American literature's most distinctive and undervalued voices".

An Integral Edition of all Vance's works was published in 44 volumes and in 2010 a six-volume The Complete Jack Vance was released.

He died at his home in Oakland, California on May 26, 2013, aged 96.

Vance's great-grandfather is believed to have arrived in California from Michigan a decade before the Gold Rush and married a San Francisco woman.