"Our carefully defined character, once placed in crisis, will invariably surprise by what he will say and do."
All About Me
Larry Kelley is a writer and a contract negotiator in the construction industry and whimsically describes himself as an adventurer and an early developer of the modern skateboard. He attended the University of California at Santa Barbara and earned a B.A. in English Literature. In between readings of Keats and Wordsworth, he took up surfing and zealously adopted the resident neo-beat-generation surfing subculture of Isla Vista, the off-campus “youth ghetto” overlooking the Pacific. Reminiscent of the narrator in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, soon after graduation and with practically no money, Kelley embarked on several solo, madcap, endless-summer surfing explorations beginning with sojourns at the international surfing Mecca of Biarritz, France, and moved on to Lisbon, Tangiers, Casablanca as well as other unnamed, hang-outs and breaks in southern Morocco and the Spanish Sahara. After a surf trip to the Caribbean and Central America, Kelley moved to Vail, Colorado, to ski and write his first novel. From Vail, he moved to San Francisco and was an account manager in commercial security and a freelance writer. His articles appeared in many publications, including Human Events Magazine, Townhall Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. During this period, Kelley returned to the mountains with his good friend, Christian Lustic, and climbed the five tallest peaks in the lower 48 states, including the Grand Tetons in Wyoming.
While in San Francisco, he met his future wife, the alluring Deborah Dickson. “I snatched her from a group of suiters in a move worthy of James Dean,” says Kelley. Although she disputes Kelley’s version of their meeting, she recounts, “He proposed, and I accepted his proposal after a whirlwind eight weeks.”
Today, they have two loving and successful sons, Brendan, a world-class skier, and Austin, an international surfer, both inheriting their father’s love of adventure and learning. “If it weren’t for my wife, I would have failed in life, and my sons would not be where they are today. She has been our gift from God,” he says.
In 2012, Kelley’s epochal book, Lessons from Fallen Civilizations, appeared to great acclaim. It not only answers many questions raised by the attacks of 9/11 but chronicles the rise of and causes for the fall of five great civilizations. It is a saga that begins on the plain of Marathon in 490 BC and ends with the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. Its main character is Western Civilization.
Today Kelley’s new book is a historical fiction novel, "An American Slave in Barbery – The Confessions of Tyler Prescott Jones". It is an allegory for the present and, like his first book, an adventure story that makes us remember – Freedom is always under siege.
My HP Books
Coming
Soon!
"An American Slave in Barbary"
An American Slave in Barbary: The Confessions of Tyler Prescott Jones -
a Homeric American historical novel
An American Slave in Barbary/The Confessions of Tyler Prescott Jones is the story of a first-generation American student whose commercial ship is captured in the summer of 1801 by Muslim pirates. He spends the next sixteen years as a captive in Algiers. There he rises to become a confidant to the Dey of Algiers who is desperate to know what made the American shopkeepers and farmers believe they could defeat the British war machine, and how did they intend to rule themselves. In the genre begun by Homer, it is a tale of suffering, sin and redemption and a young man's epic journey to regain his freedom.
book excerpt
Our Capture
On the morning of August 2, 1801, seven days after we left Greece, we were only about thirty leagues from the Straits of Gibraltar. Adjusting the sails and riggings of our twelve-man ketch, Intrepid, we made ready our departure from the Mediterranean and our entrance into the Atlantic. It was on our return voyage to Boston when our passage was blocked by two Muslim pirate ships. Each was a three-masted xebec, with crews of about one hundred and fourteen canons. They did not fire their cannons at us, because their aim was to capture our ship intact and our crew alive.
For the rest of the day, our captain, my Uncle Raymond, and his helmsman, Mr. Bagan, desperately attempted to elude the two corsairs that maneuvered about us like huge sharks. While we struggled to keep our two-masted ketch away from our pursuers, a storm gathered from the east. A menacing black cloud descended to the water.
Captain Raymond shouted from the quarterdeck, “If’n we kin make it into that storm, we kin possibly escape these bastards!”
One of the Muslim corsairs came so close to us we could see the pirates on the larger vessel holding their grappling hooks, readying to fling them at us and pull their boat against ours to board us. During one of these close encounters, our first mate, Mr. Freeman, and the boson, Mr. Leeson, fired their muskets at our pursuers. I saw a pirate take one of the rounds and fall back onto the deck. A group of Muslim gunmen perched on the riggings of the vessel closest to us opened fire, raking our deck with lead shot. One ball hit Mr. Leeson in the neck, killing him instantly.
