Andrew Gross
| Andrew Gross | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1952 Manhattan, New York United States |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater |
Middlebury College Columbia University |
| Period | 1990–present |
| Genre | Thriller |
| Website | |
| www |
|
Andrew Gross (born 1952) is an American author of thriller novels including four New York Times bestsellers. He is best known for his collaborations with suspense writer James Patterson. Gross’s books feature close family bonds, relationships characterized by loss or betrayal and large degree of emotional resonance which generally lead to wider crimes and cover-ups. They have all been published by William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins.
Andrew Gross was born in New York City in 1952. He grew up in Manhattan and attended the Barnard School for Boys. Both his father and his grandfather on his mother’s side were successful clothing manufacturers; they ran the Leslie Fay Companies, named after his mother.
Gross received a degree in English from Middlebury College in 1974. In 1979, he met his wife, Lynn, on a blind date in New York City, and they married three years later. In 1982, he received a Masters in Business Policy from Columbia University.
After a two-year stint in Denver, where he worked as a dress buyer, he opened a stew-and-soup fast food pilot named Ebeneezer's. He eventually went back to work for his family's publicly held apparel firm, the Leslie Fay Companies.
In 1984, Gross took over Head NV Sportswear, the struggling arm of the iconic ski and tennis brand, and by 1989, had repositioned it into the number one upscale producer of tennis and ski apparel in the United States and a thriving brand in Europe as well, before leaving for a larger role at Leslie Fay (which then had close to a billion dollars in annual sales and was listed on the ). As Gross describes it, ”sometimes the toughest thing about being in a family company is that it's filled with your own family", and in 1991, he left to pursue his own opportunities at Le Coq Sportif, a boutique tennis/golf brand, and Sun Ice, Inc., a Canadian skiwear manufacturer, the latter, “ending poorly and abruptly", as Gross says, “and hastening my writing career".
Gross attended the Writers Program at the University of Iowa. He took three years to finish a draft of his first book, Hydra (1998), a political thriller. He recalls: “after dozens of rejections from agents and ultimately publishers, not knowing what my next step in life was, and sitting around my study, wondering what cliff I was going to drive our SUV off of, I received a phone call from someone who asked, ‘Can you take a call from James Patterson?’” Gross met with Patterson and discussed the early concepts for what ultimately became the Women's Murder Club series. Patterson explained that the head of his publishing house had forwarded Gross's unpublished manuscript to him with the words scratched on the cover: “This guy does women well!” Patterson and Gross formed a partnership in less than a week.
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