Patrick Rothfuss

Patrick Rothfuss spent nine years as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point — first in chemical engineering, then English — and worked there afterward as an instructor while spending roughly fourteen years writing and rewriting his debut novel before it ever sold. That novel, The Name of the Wind (2007), turned an unassuming Wisconsin lecturer into a critically acclaimed, chart-topping fantasy writer almost overnight, praised as much for its prose as its story: an innkeeper named Kote who is secretly Kvothe, a legendary and self-mythologizing figure recounting his own life story to a chronicler over three days, in a university-set coming-of-age tale built around a magic system with genuinely rigorous rules. The Wise Man's Fear followed in 2011, also debuting at number one on the New York Times list, and Rothfuss has used his success to build Worldbuilders, a nonprofit he founded in 2008 that has raised more than $8.5 million for Heifer International and other humanitarian causes through the genre-fiction community. The trilogy's promised conclusion, The Doors of Stone, remains unpublished more than a decade after The Wise Man's Fear, making Kingkiller one of fantasy's most famously unfinished stories — new readers should start with The Name of the Wind knowing that going in, since the first two books stand as a complete, deeply satisfying read on their own even without a resolution yet in sight.