Joseph Wambaugh

Best-selling author Joseph Wambaugh is considered the father of the modern police novel.

The son of a policeman, Wambaugh was an only child, born and raised in East Pittsburgh, in a Roman Catholic tradition.  Three of his grandparents were Irish immigrants and the fourth was a German American whose ancestral name, Wambach, was probably altered at Ellis Island.  At the age of fourteen he and his parents traveled to California to bury a relative and they decided to stay.