Ron Terpening (born Ronnie Harold Terpening on May 3, 1946) is an American writer, professor of Italian, and editor. Though he started his writing career as an author of young-adult fiction, where the father/son conflict is a major theme, he is best known for his later novels of suspense, most of which are set, at least in part, in Italy, reflecting his academic background as a scholar of Italian culture. His thriller League of Shadows, for example, deals with the Fascist Era in Italy and its aftermath in the contemporary world.In an interview, Terpening stated that he first learned of Mussolini’s secret police, the OVRA, the focus of the novel’s historical episodes, when he designed a course on Benito Mussolini and Fascism. See Ronterpening.com and the last question in his interview for The Turning: Ronterpening.com A later international thriller, Nine Days in October, came out of the author's course research on the forces of order and disorder in contemporary ItalySee Ronterpening.com and follows a band of criminals and ex-terrorists as they attempt to carry out an assassination plot. All of his novels, including Storm Track and Tropic of Fear, the latter set in Paraguay, are noted for their strong sense of place.See Terpening’s interview for Tropic of Fear: Ronterpening.com In most of his novels, his protagonist is usually a common man placed in a situation where powerful forces are arrayed against him.
While his novels take place in the modern era, Terpening's academic research has focused on Italian authors of the Renaissance, most notably the Venetian Humanist Lodovico Dolce, although he has also published a study of the infernal boatman Charon and numerous articles on other writers of the 15th and 16th centuries. His editing work has ranged from textbooks, mostly anthologies of Italian literature, to broad studies of Italian culture.
Biography
Early life Terpening was born in Bellingham, Washington in 1946, second son of Harold Russell and Darlene Elizabeth Terpening. His father was a Protestant minister and an evangelist who started several churches in the state of Washington.Contemporary Authors, Detroit: Cengage, 2006, vol. 248.
After living in Birch Bay, Pateros, and Moses Lake, Washington, Terpening attended grade school in Ferndale, Warden, Wenatchee, and Seattle (in Washington state) and Portland and Gresham (in Oregon). He graduated from Gresham Union High School in 1964.
Terpening completed his undergraduate work at the University of Oregon in Eugene (B.A. Romance Languages, Honors College, 1969), where he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa national honor society. He spent his Sophomore year in Pavia, Italy, and lived in Mexico City for one year. His semi-autobiographical novel In Light’s Delay narrates several events of those years (1966–1968).See the Author’s Note in the preface to In Light’s Delay (Tucson: Desert Bloom Press, 1988). In his youth, Terpening held a variety of jobs while attending school and first beginning to write fiction: he serviced vehicles in a dairy, worked in a berry growers cannery, on a cement gang in construction, as a striper of panels in a Georgia-Pacific veneer plant, a crew dispatcher for Southern Pacific Railroad, a housekeeping aide in Herrick Hospital (Berkeley, California), a mail handler for the U.S. Postal System in Oakland, and a teacher.Back cover copy, In Light’s Delay (Tucson: Desert Bloom Press, 1988).
He completed his Master's (1973) and Ph.D. in Italian (1978) at the University of California, Berkeley. His revised dissertation was later published as Charon and the Crossing: Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Transformations of a Myth (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985). The illustrated book was the first comprehensive study of the underworld boatman Charon as found in the literary tradition from pre-Homeric texts through the early Baroque period in Italy. Thomas G. Bergin (Yale University) said that the book, “in grace of an engaging style and a never flagging interest in [the] subject, makes for lively reading.”Annali d’Italianistica, vol. 3 (1985), p. 188.
Career
Terpening taught Italian for four years at Loyola University of Chicago (1978–1982). He worked as an editorial assistant for John Tedeschi on two volumes of the Bibliographie Internationale de l’Humanisme et de la Renaissance and was a research fellow of the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund, The Renaissance Society of America, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities in conjunction with the Newberry Library.Back cover, Charon and the Crossing. He also received a fellowship from the American Association of Teachers of Italian to study at the Università Italiana per Stranieri di Perugia (Italy), in 1981.
From 1982 to 2008, Terpening was a professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Arizona, where he introduced a new option in Italian Studies for the bachelor's degree, a program that covered Italian culture from prehistoric times to the present. He directed the Arizona Study Abroad Program in Florence, Italy, in 1987, and was co-acting head of the department in 1996. Beginning in 1986, he also served on the editorial board of New Connections: Studies in Interdisciplinarity.
Author of numerous scholarly articles and reviews dealing with Italian and Spanish literature, he published his second academic book, Lodovico Dolce: Renaissance Man of Letters, in 1997.Lodovico Dolce: Renaissance Man of Letters (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1997). He is also the author and editor of several academic texts, most notably a pseudonymous study Beautiful Italy, Beloved Shores. An Illustrated Cultural History of Italy, Vol. 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of the Roman Empire and two anthologies of Italian literature with text in Italian and notes in scholarly articles deal with authors such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Angelo Poliziano, Pietro Bembo, Giordano Bruno, Miguel de Cervantes, and Giambattista Marino.For reviews of these and other articles, see Attilio Bettinzoli in Lettere Italiane, 39, No. 1 (1987), pp. 99–100 Rosanna Alhaique Pettinelli in La Rassegna della letteratura italiana, No. 1–2 (1974), p. 171 Robert Hollander, Boccaccio's Two Venuses (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 192 Daria Perocco in Lettere Italiane, 37, No. 4 (1985), p. 521 The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, 38 (1976), p. 26l The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, 38 (1976), p. 430 Paolo Marolda, in La Rassegna della letteratura italiana, Anno 84, Serie VII, N. 3 (1980), 639–640 John M. A. Lindon in The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, 42 (1980), pp. 526–527.
Terpening retired in 2008 and is now a professor emeritus of Italian at the University of Arizona.
Novels
Young adult fiction Terpening began his first novel (In Light’s Delay) while an undergraduate at the University of Oregon in the late 60s, where he also worked as a features reporter for the Oregon Daily Emerald. He completed his second novel (The Echoes of Our Two Hearts, published in the trilogy The Hornets' Nest of Our Desires in 2023) as a graduate student at Berkeley. A third novel, The Turning, was released in 2001 and serves as the first volume in this trilogy of young-adult novels.
In Light’s Delay is the story of a young man's quest for self-discovery and love in the mid-1960s. The novel depicts the experiences of Doug Herman and his friends over the course of ten nights, at different times and places, as it follows Doug from the family farm in Oregon to a series of adventures in Italy, Mexico, and back in California.back cover copy, In Light’s Delay (Tucson: Desert Bloom Press, 1988)
The Turning, a coming-of-age tale, tells the story of Artie Crenshaw, a teenager with an abusive father. At his job one night, Artie decides to postpone going home, and the events that follow as a result of this decision cause him more trouble but ultimately help spur his progression towards manhood. Karen Hoth, writing in the School Library Journal, praised the “well-written story,” proclaiming the characters “well developed” and the book itself “touching.”Contemporary Authors, vol. 248; see also School Library Journal, vol. 47, no. 4 (April 2001), p. 151, where Karen Hoth (Marathon Middle/High School, Florida) concludes by noting: “Set in the 1960s in a small town in Oregon, this quiet story is a touching tale about a teenager caught between adolescence and manhood. The plot develops consistently throughout the evening, and the characters are believable and well developed. This well-written story conveys the seriousness of the issues and will find a wide audience.” The book was selected for inclusion on The New York Public Library’s 2002 Books For The Teen Age List, the “best of the previous year’s publishing for teenagers,” by the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association for their Top Forty Young-Adult Novels for 2001, and by Appleton North High School (Appleton, Wisconsin) for their Top 25 Recommended Reading (2002).
Suspense Inspired by the suspense fiction he was reading (notably Clive Cussler, Robert Ludlum, Jack Higgins, and David Morrell), Terpening began work on a thriller while teaching at Loyola University of Chicago, where he used the Chicago Public Library for technical research.
Storm Track His first published thriller, Storm Track (New York: Walker & Company, 1989), was inspired, in part, by Cussler's Mediterranean Caper. As part of the research for this book, Terpening became a certified scuba diver. Storm Track tells the story of a commercial oil-field diver, working on a jack-up off the coast of Tunisia, where his wife is killed in a terrorist attack. William C. McCully (Park Ridge Public Library, Illinois), writing in Library Journal, praised the thriller's “non-stop action” and “breathtaking pace,” as well as its settings in Italy, Sicily, Malta, and Tunisia.William C. McCully, Library Journal (April 15, 1989). And Suzy Smith, author of The Afterlife Codes, The Book of James, and Ghost Writers in the Sky, in The Write Word, called Terpening “the next Ken Follett.”
League of Shadows
Terpening's second thriller, League of Shadows (2005), was a contemporary novel of intrigue with an extensive back story that takes place in Italy during the Fascist Era.For a visual presentation on Fascist symbols and ideology, see Ronterpening.com The historical scenes depict the efforts of three spies in 1943 to infiltrate Italian leader Benito Mussolini’s secret police, the OVRA. Decades after that intrigue went horribly wrong, an unknown enemy begins to hunt down the former secret agents, and their one hope for survival is an ex-cop obsessed with his mission. The Midwest Book Review called the novel “an addictive read, weaving together human drive, determination, and betrayal into a gripping whole”,The Midwest Book Review, Small Press Bookwatch, The Fiction Shelf (December 2004). while Lucille Cormier, in The Historical Novels Review, said that “You can race through this suspense thriller riding the whirlwind of drug busts, jungle guerrilla attacks, gun fights, assassinations, and love affairs right into the breathtaking climax. Or, if you are disciplined enough, you can turn each page slowly and savor the extraordinary visual and historical detail Ron Terpening has painted into his complex story. Either way, you are in for a treat. This is a book to add to every collection of historical fiction.”The Historical Novels Review, no. 31 (February 2005), p. 38. See also Joel Tscherne (Cleveland Public Library), in Library Journal, vol. 129, no. 20 (December 2004), pp. 103–104. Joel Tscherne (Cleveland Public Library) noted in Library Journal that this is a novel that “fans of Jack Higgins’s thrillers will enjoy.”Library Journal, vol. 129, no. 20 (December 2004), pp. 103–104.
Tropic of Fear