Jean M. Auel

Author profile

born

February 18, 1936 in Chicago, Illinois, The United States

gender

female

website

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/auel/webroot/

genre

Literature & Fiction

About this author

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Jean M. Auel, née Jean Marie Untinen is an American writer. She is best known for her Earth's Children books, a series of historical fiction novels set in prehistoric Europe that explores interactions of Cro-Magnon people with Neanderthals. Her books have sold 34 million copies world-wide in many translations.

Author Jean Marie Auel (surname pronounced like "owl") is the second of five children of Neil Solomon Untinen, a housepainter, and Martha Wirtanen. She and her husband, Ray Bernard Auel, have five children and live in Portland, Oregon.

Auel has been a member of Mensa since 1964. She attended Portland State University and the University of Portland. While studying, she worked as a clerk (1965-1966), a circuit board designer (1966-1973),...more Jean M. Auel, née Jean Marie Untinen is an American writer. She is best known for her Earth's Children books, a series of historical fiction novels set in prehistoric Europe that explores interactions of Cro-Magnon people with Neanderthals. Her books have sold 34 million copies world-wide in many translations.

Author Jean Marie Auel (surname pronounced like "owl") is the second of five children of Neil Solomon Untinen, a housepainter, and Martha Wirtanen. She and her husband, Ray Bernard Auel, have five children and live in Portland, Oregon.

Auel has been a member of Mensa since 1964. She attended Portland State University and the University of Portland. While studying, she worked as a clerk (1965-1966), a circuit board designer (1966-1973), technical writer (1973-1974), and a credit manager at Tektronix (1974-1976). At one time, she shared a secretary with author Ursula K. Le Guin.[citation needed] She earned an MBA in 1976 and has received honorary degrees from the University of Maine and Mount Vernon College for Women.

In 1977, Auel began extensive library research of the Ice Age for her first book. She joined a survival class to learn how to construct an ice cave, and learned primitive methods of making fire, tanning leather, and knapping stone from aboriginal skills expert Jim Riggs. Auel describes Riggs as "the kind of person you could put into one end of a wilderness naked, and he'd come out the other end fed, clothed, and sheltered." Clan of the Cave Bear was nominated for numerous literary awards, including an American Booksellers Association nomination for best first novel.

After the success of the first book, Auel was able to travel to prehistoric sites and to meet many of the experts with whom she had been corresponding. Her research has taken her across Europe from France to Ukraine, including most of what Marija Gimbutas called Old Europe. She has developed a close friendship with Dr. Jean Clottes of France who was responsible for, among many other things, the exploration of the Cosquer Cave discovered in 1985 and the Chauvet Cave discovered in 1994.

Jean Auel's books have been commended for their anthropological authenticity and their ethnobotanical accuracy. However, recent archaeological research may suggest that some prehistorical details in the series are inaccurate and others fictional, and that specifications of prehistorical milestones are sometimes arbitrary and inconsistent. For example, the differences between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens may have been exaggerated or underestimated in the series; it has been found that Neanderthals had a hyoid bone and may thus have been capable of using vocal language and not as dependent on sign language as portrayed in the series (the existence of a Neanderthal hyoid bone wasn't confirmed until 1983, some years after the first book in the series was published).
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Books by Jean M. Auel

Average rating: 3.81 · 143,702 ratings · 6,824 reviews · 26 distinct works

	The Clan of the Cave Bear (Earth's Children, #1) 3.89 avg rating — 61,256 ratings — published 1980 — 97 editions	My rating:
	The Valley of Horses (Earth's Children, #2) 3.88 avg rating — 22,521 ratings — published 1982 — 12 editions	My rating:
	The Mammoth Hunters (Earth's Children, #3) 3.79 avg rating — 19,712 ratings — published 1985 — 75 editions	My rating:
	The Plains of Passage (Earth's Children, #4) 3.69 avg rating — 16,536 ratings — published 1990 — 72 editions	My rating:
	The Shelters of Stone (Earth's Children, #5) 3.73 avg rating — 12,972 ratings — published 2002 — 50 editions	My rating:
	The Land of Painted Caves (Earth's Children, #6) 2.85 avg rating — 5,769 ratings — published 2011 — 4 editions	My rating:
	The Clan of the Cave Bear, the Valley of Horses, the Mammoth Hunters, the Plains of Passage (Earth's Children, #1-4) 4.18 avg rating — 1,953 ratings — published 1986 — 4 editions	My rating:
	The Clan of the Cave Bear & The Valley of Horses (Earth's Children, #1-2) 4.16 avg rating — 1,391 ratings — published 1980 — 5 editions	My rating:
	Clan of the Cave Bear, The Valley of Horses, The Mammoth Hunters, 4.20 avg rating — 521 ratings — published 1986 — 7 editions	My rating:
	The Clan of the Cave Bear, the Valley of Horses, the Mammoth Hunters, the Plains of Passage, The Shelters of Stone (Earth's Children, #1-5) by Jean M. Auel, Sandra Burr (Reader) 4.37 avg rating — 393 ratings — published 1989 — 3 editions	My rating:

More books by Jean M. Auel…

Series by Jean M. Auel

Earth's Children (6 books)
by Jean M. Auel

3.81 avg rating — 143,531 ratings

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Interviews

April 2011, Jean M. Auel
"Prehistoric fiction fans have waited three decades for The Land of Painted Caves, the conclusion to the epic Earth Children series set 25,000 years ago." ...More

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Quotes by Jean M. Auel

“They stared at each other, wanting each other, drawn to each other, but their silent shout of love went unheard in the roar of misunderstanding, and the clatter of culturally ingrained beliefs.”
― Jean M. Auel, The Mammoth Hunters

tags: culture , love

35 people liked it

“Life is neither static nor unchanging. With no individuality, there can be no change, no adaptation and, in an inherently changing world, any species unable to adapt is also doomed.”
― Jean M. Auel

tags: adaptation , change , individuality , life , variety

33 people liked it

“You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.”
― Jean M. Auel

tags: inspirational , writing

29 people liked it

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Polls

Please vote for your pick for the January book club. Voting ends December 30, 2009

The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory

12 votes, 22.6%

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks

11 votes, 20.8%

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

9 votes, 17.0%

The Clan of the Cave Bear (Earth' Children #1)

The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel

5 votes, 9.4%

by Fingersmith Sarah Waters

5 votes, 9.4%

Jerusalem by Cecelia Holland

4 votes, 7.5%

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

4 votes, 7.5%

Katherine by Anya Seton

3 votes, 5.7%

53 total votes

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