Ken Grimwood

Ken Grimwood (February 27, 1944 - June 6, 2003) was an American author who was born in Pensacola, Florida. In his fantasy fiction Grimwood combined themes of life-affirmation and hope with metaphysical concepts, themes found in his best-known novel, the highly popular Replay.

His sister, Teresa Panther-Yates, once described him as "a brilliant, beautiful human being who knew that the best of fiction has a message." On New Year's Day, 2006, she recalled their youth:

I have done our genealogy and our ancestry was largely French with some Cherokee. I have fond memories of our days in rural Alabama on the farm with our grandparents. It would read like a Mark Twain novel. Ken had a smile that would fill up a room. His first short story (at the age of four) was about a cat the size of a roach. I thought we would burn the house down several times over when we were young (well... he was old enough to know better) with his chemistry set. We nearly did once for real when we decided to have a fire in the fireplace (Ken was about 18 and I was about nine), and he forgot to open the flue. We dragged around on the floor underneath the smoke until he remembered what to do. My mother (Nina Newberry... also deceased) never knew this, nor did my father (living). He brought a bat home once (he was about 15) and laughed hysterically as my mother went shrieking through the house.

Ken Grimwood took an interest in EC Comics and radio journalism while growing up in Pensacola. In the early to mid-1960s, he worked in news at WLAK in Lakeland, Florida. Heading north, he studied psychology at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where he contributed short fiction to Bard's student publication, Observer in 1969.

Some of his early novels were written while he was the news director at KNX 10.70 Newsradio in Los Angeles, but the success of Replay enabled him to leave KNX for full-time writing. He wrote under both his own name and several pseudonyms, including Alan Cochran.

Married once with no children, Ken Grimwood had friends on both coasts, including Tom Atwill, who is related to the actor Lionel Atwill. Atwill described his friend's "free spirit lifestyle" and recalled, "He was a loner, almost a recluse. He liked small gatherings of friends. We had many dinner parties with him and some friends, and he would always be the one to keep the evening hilarious; he was a great storyteller. He did not like publicity and was actually quite shy... He was a media junkie. He owned the first BetaMax sold; he had the largest video library I've ever seen. One of his favorite things to do was for he and I to watch some old movie in the afternoon; we did it often."

Selected Bibliography

Novels

• Breakthrough (1976)
• Elise (1979)
• The Voice Outside (1982)
• Replay (1987)
• Into the Deep (1995)

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