A few words about Jack Noon

Jack Noon has been fishing in New Hampshire for "more than a third of all the time bass have been in the state." He wrote his first book right after his 1968 graduation from Dartmouth College in the few weeks before he left to hitchhike across Europe to a teaching job in Greece. He's been writing ever since.

He was cook on an archeological dig in Alaska and then wrote for a winter in Fairbanks. During a four-year teaching stint in Vermont, he spent one summer traveling in West Africa including a July crossing of the Sahara and two summers in northern New Hampshire building log cabins on the Dead Diamond River. Other work to support his writing has included horselogging, leading winter camping trips as an instructor for Outward Bound, laboring at construction sites, building a log home, managing the Ravine Lodge at Mount Moosilauke, and working as a loon biologist.

The author is a longtime resident of Sutton, where he now writes full time about New Hampshire, both in fiction and nonfiction. From an early 19th century setting in his created townships of Wheelock, N.H., and Barston, Vt., he has written and published three novels of historical fiction: The Big Fish of Barston Falls, Old Sam's Thunder, and Up Moosilauke!. His previously published nonfiction was The Squam Lakes and Their Loons. Under the pen name of M.J. Beagle, he wrote two books of humor: Sit Free or Die and The New Hampshire Primer: A Guaranteed Guide to Winning the New Hampshire Primary.

His two recent volumes - The Bassing of New Hampshire (Vol. 1) and Fishing in New Hampshire (Vol. 2)- make up the New Hampshire Fishing Series, with Volume 3 planned for 2005.

An avid outdoorsman, Jack Noon has taken long canoe trips in Quebec and the Northwest Territories, goes winter camping in northern New Hampshire every year, and -- of course fishes a great deal.