Ken Wells is a journalist and novelist who grew up in a snake-collecting family on the banks of the Bayou Black, LA., deep in Cajun country.  He began his writing career as a 19-year-old college dropout covering car wrecks and gator sightings for his semiweekly hometown paper, the Houma Courier.  He eventually got his B.A. in English and left the bayous in 1975 for the University of Missouri School of Journalism, graduating with honors from the master's program in 1977. 

 

He went on to the Miami Herald where in 1982 he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a series on how a multibillion-dollar draining system serving agribusiness was helping decimate parts of the Everglades. Wells joined The Wall Street Journal that same year in it's San Francisco bureau and roamed the West covering stories as disparate as polygamy in Utah and the Exxon Valdez Alaska oil spill, and contributing regularly to the paper's popular Page One "middle column" feature. He moved to the London bureau in 1990, in time to help out with the paper's reportage of the first Persian Gulf War. He traveled widely in Africa and wrote extensively about South Africa's transition to a nonradical democracy.

 

Wells transferred to New York in 1993, where he joined the paper's Page One staff as a writer and editor, eventually running a team of reporters that wrote exclusively for the front page. Two of his team, Tony Horwitz and Angelo Henderson, went on to win Pulitzer Prizes. Ken left the paper in October 2006 after 24 years to join Conde Nast Portfolio as a senior editor. Wells' literary commitment to his bayou home runs deep. He is the author of four well-received novels of Cajun Louisiana: Meely LaBauve, Junior's Leg, Logan's Storm, and Crawfish Mountain, a picaresque satire of political skullduggery and Big Oil shenanigans in the Louisiana wetlands. He is also editor of two anthologies of Journal "middle column stories," Floating Off the Page and Herd on the Street.