Robert L. O’Connell was educated at Colgate University and the University of Virginia, where he received a Ph.D. in history. He worked for three decades in the U.S. Intelligence Community, before becoming a Visiting Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey California. He has two grown children and lives with his wife in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the author of six published histories and one novel. Besides Fierce Patriot, the Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman (Random House, 2014), he has also written The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (Random House,, 2010), Soul of the Sword (The Free Press, 2002), Ride of the Second Horseman: the Birth and Death of War (Oxford University Press, 1995), Sacred Vessels: the Cult of the Battleship and the Rise of the U.S. Navy (Oxford University Press, 1993), Of Arms and Men; a History of War, Weapons and Aggression (Oxford University Press, 1989), and Fast Eddie: a Novel in Many Voices(Morrow, 1999).