Stephen R. Donaldson was born in Cleveland on May 13, 1947 to James R. Donaldson, a medical missionary, and Mary Ruth Reeder, a prosthetist. From the age of four to sixteen, he lived in India where his father worked with lepers. Mr. Donaldson earned his B.A. degree in 1968 from the College of Wooster (Ohio) and his M.A. in English from Kent State University in 1971.
Mr. Donaldson's major work to date, the two trilogies called the first and second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, has been a best seller in hardback and paperback editions and as book club selections, and it has been published in England and translated into several languages. The first series was awarded the first prize of the British Science Fiction Society in 1977-1978, and Mr. Donaldson received the John W. Campbell Award as the best new science fiction writer of 1978. He has also published the "Mordant's Need" books, the "Gap" series, a number of short stories and, under the pseudonym Reed Stephens, three detective novels.
In terms of quality and significance, the work of Stephen Donaldson has been compared to the "Narnia" series of C.S. Lewis, the "Middle-Earth" stories of J.R.R. Tolkien, and Frank Herbert's "Dune" trilogy.