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Roderick, John (1914 - 2008)
Genre: Non-Fiction
John Roderick was born in Waterville, ME and orphaned at an early age. He began his career in journalism at the age of 15 when he began writing for the Waterville Morning Sentinel. He graduated from Colby College, then joined the Associated Press office in Portland in 1937. In 1942, he moved to the AP office in Washington D.C. but was drafted in 1943. He served in the OSS durring WWII and stationed in China. After the war, he stayed in China working as an AP foreign correspondent. He lived with and reported on Mao Zedong and the other Communist rebels in the caves near the Gobi Desert during their raids against the Japanese and the Kuomintang. He relocated to the Middle East in 1948 to cover the formation of the country of Israel, but remained interested in China and its politics. In 1979, after Nixon's visit and the re-normalization of relations between the U.S. and China, he returned there and became head of the Beijing Bureau of the Associated Press. He died in Hawaii in 2008.
Selected Bibliography
- Covering China: The Story of an American Reporter from Revolutionary Days to the Deng Era (1993)
- Minka: My Farmhouse in Japan (2008)
