About John
“The role of the storyteller, I’ve always believed, is to make the invisible visible. To tell the untold story, to shine a light on hidden truths.”
— John H. Ritter
John H. Ritter grew up in the brush-filled chaparral hills east of San Diego, CA. “Out in that wild country,” he says, “there was a real sense of the spirits who walked the land in the centuries before. And being so cut off from other kids, I roamed the hills a lot, following hawks and quail, climbing boulders, sitting in ancient caves. Rattlesnakes never bothered us much. But I felt the spirits everywhere.”
Tragedy struck early, however, when John’s mother died of breast cancer when he was four, leaving his father, a newspaper sports writer, to raise four small children. John still recalls his mother and her songs. “One thing I remember about my mom is that she sang to us constantly, making up a song for each of her children that fit our personalities perfectly. So from her, I got a sense of how to capture a person’s spirit in a lyrical phrase.”
Over time, John’s musical interests continued to grow. In high school, the topical songs of Bob Dylan inspired him to write his own, hoping to pursue a musical career. He was, however, a “wild student,” he admits to historical novelist Chris Crowe in an interview for The ALAN Review, and was torn between his love of baseball and writing, calling himself both “a high achiever and a rabble rouser,” noting, for example, that he was voted Senior Class President and the Senior Class Clown.
At the University of California, San Diego, John studied communications while playing shortstop and center field for the UCSD baseball team, as he continued writing poetry and songs. But by his sophomore year, he recalls, “I was anxious to get on with my life. And for the vision I had in mind, college didn’t have much to offer. I knew I had to walk the streets, touch life, embrace life, gain experience.” Doing what his literary heroes Dylan, Kerouac, Steinbeck, and Twain had done before him, John left school, taking a job as a painter’s apprentice, and set about traveling the country. He learned to live so cheaply that he could earn enough in three months to allow him to travel and write for the rest of the year. He did that for several years until he married his wife, Cheryl, whom he had met in college, and they had a baby daughter. With a family to care for, John needed to work nine months a year, but the rest of his time went into writing, an artistic lifestyle he later spotlighted in his song-laden novel, Under the Baseball Moon.
In 1994, after publishing several short stories, John received the SCBWI/Judy Blume grant for a novel in progress. Two years later he submitted his manuscript through the Curtis Brown Agency to Philomel where it became the first acquisition of junior editor Michael Green. Since then, Philomel has published all seven of John’s novels.
In 1999, that first book, Choosing Up Sides, won the International Reading Association Children’s Book Award for Older Readers and was named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. This hard-hitting work of historical fiction, set in Southern Ohio, was praised by Kirkus Reviews as, “No ordinary baseball book, this is a rare first novel.”
In 2004, John received the Paterson Prize for Children’s Literature for his third novel, The Boy Who Saved Baseball. Cited in People magazine as a book to read, “Now that the youngsters have read Harry Potter…”, The Boy also garnered a starred review in Publishers Weekly, which called the book’s prose “Enthralling…at times stunning,” adding that, “Ritter delivers a tale of legendary dimension.”
His magical realism novel, Under the Baseball Moon, set in the eclectic San Diego town of Ocean Beach, garnered high praise and three starred reviews from Kirkus, Library Journal, and Booklist for its multi-layered, mysterious, and myth-heavy plot.
Literary scholar and essayist Patty Campbell noted that, “Another aspect of John H. Ritter’s writing that merits high praise is the variety and inventiveness of his language. Richly evocative metaphors gather layers of meaning as the stories unfold, and the verbal style of each novel is neatly crafted to its place and time.”
John’s fifth book, The Desperado Who Stole Baseball, takes an historical look at the roots of racism in Major League Baseball while his sixth novel, Fenway Fever, celebrates the innate power to heal that even the least among us is born with. New York Times bestselling author Peter Abrahams called Fenway Fever, “Funny, exciting, original, and heartwarming.”
“In all of these wonderful novels,” writes Patty Campbell, “John H. Ritter steps up to the plate with books that are fun to read, fun to discuss, and important in the difficult process of growing up to be an ethical human being.”
Putting into practice his belief that storytelling should “shine a light on hidden truths,” John’s most recent novel, America’s Game, tells the little-known, often -buried story of the cruel and unusual treatment of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center during WW II. As Chris Crowe notes, “Readers will ache as they read about the injustices these people endured, including the complex personal tolls they paid for ‘crimes’ they did not commit. The light at the heart of their bleak circumstance is the baseball diamond, an almost sacred space where the prisoners could reclaim their humanity, build community, and prove their American identity in the face of overwhelming odds.”
John and his wife Cheryl recently celebrated 50 years of marriage.