Jerry Jenkins' tiny ego is the flip side of his massive sales figures. Referring to himself as "the most famous author no one had ever heard of," the writer of the bestselling "Left Behind" books (total sales: 65 million and counting) refuses to brag about his success.
"The average reader doesn't notice the name of a faceless writer," he said. "More than once I was asked if I had read a certain book -- when I had written it."
Jenkins was in the Twin Cities recently to speak at Northwestern College as part of the Roseville school's "Lessons From Leaders" series. And even that announcement came steeped in modesty.
"I'm not sure what I have to share," said Jenkins, whose son, Dallas, graduated from Northwestern. "I got to work with Billy Graham on his memoirs. Now, if you're looking for a lesson from a leader, you could hardly do better than that."
Before the "Left Behind" series, Jenkins, 58, wrote "as told to" autobiographies. In addition to Graham, he worked with the likes of Hank Aaron, Nolan Ryan and Orel Hershiser. Yes, they're all baseball stars. No, that's not a coincidence.
"I wanted to be a professional baseball player, but an injury ended my career," he said. "I realized that a way to stay close to the sport was as a reporter."
He landed a job as a freelancer covering his hometown team, the Chicago White Sox. He was only 14. His goal was to become sports editor of the Chicago Tribune by the time he was 35. At 21, he was well on his way to achieving that, working full time as a sports reporter, when he remembered another promise he had made to himself five years earlier: to focus on Christian-oriented work.
So even though "my colleagues thought I was nuts," he took a job with a company that produced a newspaper for Sunday School classes. Shortly after he started, the company launched a line of inspirational books and his career as a novelist was launched.
