John Thorne

Who is John Thorne?

John Thorne is a culinary writer born in Quincy, Massachusetts, who has written a number of best-selling books on gastronomy. A graduate of Amherst College, he began to teach himself to cook frugally while living briefly in New York City's Lower East Side, where he sought to become a writer of some sort as a young man during the 1960s.

By the early 1970s, he was a teacher for several years at Stockbridge School, a progressive New England boarding school that became defunct in 1976. Following this period, Thorne lived in Boston for a number of years, where he self-published a number of culinary pamphlets reviewed at the time by The New York Times, which in 1983 grew into his ongoing newsletter, "Simple Cooking".

In the middle 1980s, Thorne moved to coastal Maine to devote himself exclusively to food writing, and where he became associated with Matt Lewis, who later shared a byline for a number of his books and his newsletter. During the 1990s, the couple moved to Northampton, Mass., where they remained as of 2010.

Thorne's newsletter has consisted of essays on food preparation and appreciation blended with snatches of autobiography.