About the Author

Embarking on his writing career at age 15 as news editor of his high school newspaper, Richard Sullivan's first serious venture into the world of journalism came at age 18 as an undercover reporter in Toronto at the height of the Vietnam War, where he posed as a draft dodger in order to document the plight of the thousands of young Americans who had fled there. At age 19 he joined up with the Clyde Beaty-Cole Bros. traveling circus for an expose on the social order within that world, then at age 20 hitch-hiked his way around Europe for three months on a budget of only $500, ending up in a Polish hospital suffering from dysentery during the apex of communism. With no money to pay the bill, the hospital staff opened a window, turned their backs, and listed Sullivan officially as "escaped". Sullivan completed 55 extensive photojournalism assignments for the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine and 13 for Los Angeles Magazine. In 1987 he traveled to Veracruz for the Wall Street Journal at the invitation of the European engineers constructing Mexico's Solo Palma nuclear power plant, which was being built with bastardized and discarded materials. In 1992 he was awarded his first exhibition as an artist at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the following year won the American Airlines Travel Journalism Award for his Hawaii photo-guidebook, Driving & Discovering Oahu. In 1997 he repeated that success with Driving & Discovering Maui & Molokai. Both books are updated with each printing and continue to be steady sellers to this day. Reclaim Your Youth, published in 2009, was the product of twenty-five years in the world of fitness and bodybuilding. The First Ward Volume I, Sullivan's first novel, was published in 2011, followed by Volume II, Fingy Conners & The New Century, in 2012.