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American fantasy writer

James Oliver Rigney Jr. (October 17, 1948 – September 16, 2007), better known by his pen name Robert Jordan, was an American author of epic fantasy. He is known best for his series The Wheel of Time (finished by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan's death) which comprises 14 books and a prequel novel. He is one of several writers to have written original Conan the Barbarian novels; his are considered by fans to be some of the best of the non Robert E. Howard efforts. Jordan also published historical fiction using the pseudonym Reagan O'Neal, a western as Jackson O'Reilly, and dance criticism as Chang Lung. Jordan claimed to have ghostwritten an "international thriller" that is still believed to have been written by someone else.

Jordan was born in Charleston, South Carolina. He went to Clemson University after high school, but dropped out after one year and enlisted in the U. S. Army. He served two tours of duty during the Vietnam War as a helicopter gunner. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross with oak leaf cluster, the Bronze Star with "V" and oak leaf cluster, and two Vietnamese Gallantry Crosses with palm. After returning from Vietnam in 1970, Jordan studied physics at The Citadel. He graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Science degree and began working for the U. S. Navy as a nuclear engineer. and received communion more than once a week. Politically, he described himself as a "libertarian monarchist". He lived with his wife, Harriet McDougal, who works as a book editor (currently with Tor Books; she was also Jordan's editor) in a house built in 1797. He listed John D. MacDonald, Jane Austen, Louis L'Amour, Charles Dickens, Robert A. Heinlein, Mark Twain and Montaigne as his favorite authors.

On March 23, 2006, Jordan revealed that he had been diagnosed with cardiac amyloidosis and that, with treatment, his median life expectancy was four years. In a separate weblog post, he encouraged his fans not to worry about him and stated that he intended to have a long and creative life. He began chemotherapy at Mayo Clinic during early April 2006. He participated in a study of the drug Revlimid, which had been approved recently for multiple myeloma but not yet tested for primary amyloidosis. Jordan died on September 16, 2007, from complications stemming from multiple myeloma. His funeral service was on September 19, 2007. He was cremated and his ashes buried in the churchyard of St. James Church in Goose Creek, outside Charleston, South Carolina. Jordan's papers can be found in the special collections of the College of Charleston.

Jordan published 11 books of 14 in the main sequence of the Wheel of Time series. Reviewers and fans of the earlier books noted a slowing of the pace of events in the last few installments written solely by Jordan owing to the expansion of the scale of the series as a whole. Because of his health problems, Jordan did not work at full force on the final installment A Memory of Light (later split into three volumes beginning with The Gathering Storm), but blog entries confirmed that he continued work on it until his death, and he shared all of the significant plot details with his family not long before he died. He maintained that in doing so the book would get published even if "the worst actually happens". On December 7, 2007, Tor Books announced that Brandon Sanderson had been chosen to finish the Wheel of Time series. Harriet McDougal, Jordan's widow, chose him after reading Mistborn: The Final Empire. All paperback (PB) page totals given are for the most widely available mass market paperback editions. The page count for the hardback (HB) editions does not include glossary or appendix page counts. The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time is an encyclopedia for the series about the unnamed world where the plot takes place, which is often referred to by fans of the series as the World of the Wheel. It is published in the United States by Tor Books and in the United Kingdom by Orbit Books. The bulk of the text was written by Teresa Patterson based on notes and information provided by Jordan, who also served as the overall editor on the project. While the information in the guide is broadly canonical, the book is deliberately written with vague, biased, or even downright false (or guessed) information in places, as Patterson felt this would reflect a key theme of the series (the mutability of knowledge across time and distance).