Barry Eisler

Barry Eisler
Barry Eisler, 2009.
Born	1964 (age 52–53) United States
Occupation	Writer
Genre	Thriller
Website
barryeisler.com

Barry Mark Eisler (born 1964) is a best-selling American novelist. He is the author of two thriller series, the first featuring anti-hero John Rain, a half-Japanese, half-American former soldier turned freelance assassin, and a second featuring black ops soldier Ben Treven. Eisler also writes about politics and language on his blog Heart of the Matter, and at the blogs CHUD, Firedoglake, The Huffington Post, MichaelMoore.com, The Smirking Chimp, and Truthout.

Eisler was born in New Jersey, his father was a wholesale office supplier, and his mother an environmental activist. Eisler graduated from Cornell Law School in 1989.

After completing law school, Eisler joined the CIA, where he trained for three years afterward and held a covert position with the Directorate of Operations. In 1992, he resigned after becoming disillusioned with the bureaucracy and joined the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges. In 1994, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work for the firm's technology licensing division, then left to work in Japan for Matsushita.

In 1999, he returned to the Bay Area to join a startup.

In 2003, he started writing full-time, when he sold the rights to his debut novel, Rain Fall, the first of his series featuring John Rain.

Eisler made news in March 2011 when he walked away from a reported half million dollar advance from St. Martin's Press in order to go the self-publishing route pioneered by his colleague Joe Konrath and others. He then took a six-figure deal to publish the seventh John Rain novel, The Detachment (2011), under Amazon Publishing's Thomas & Mercer mystery imprint.