James L. Haley is the award-winning author of The Shores of Tripoli and A Darker Sea, as well as numerous books on Native American, Texas, and Western history, and historical and contemporary fiction. His two biographies, Sam Houston (2002) and Wolf: The Lives of Jack London (2010), each won the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. Passionate Nation: The Epic History of Texas (2006) won the Fehrenbach Award of the Texas Historical Commission. His most recent nonfiction is Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (2014).