John Freely

John Freely was born in New York in 1926. He joined the US Navy at the age of seventeen and served with a commando unit in Burma and China during the last months of the Second World War. He received a Ph.D. in physics from New York university in 1960, and since then he has lived in New York, Boston, London, Athens, Istanbul and Venice. His first book was Strolling Through Istanbul (1972, with Hilary Sumner-Boyd). Since then he has writen twenty other travel books, most of them about Greece and Turkey. Also published by Penguin are Classical Turkey, Strolling Through Athens and Strolling Through Venice.