Joseph R. Garber (August 14, 1943 – May 27, 2005) was an American author, best known for his 1995 thriller
Vertical Run and for the articles he wrote on technology for
Forbes magazine.
Garber was born in
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, moving often as an
army brat. He attended the
University of Virginia, but quit to join the
U.S. Army himself, eventually graduating from
East Tennessee State University in 1968 with a philosophy degree.
Garber worked for
AT&T as a business
long-distance consultant and a writer for the
AT&T in-house magazine. He then worked as a consultant for
Booz Allen Hamilton for a decade, writing fiction and non-fiction
freelance in his spare time. After a prolonged
flu, he quit his job and moved to
Woodside, California, where he wrote for
Forbes magazineand as a consultant in
Redwood City, California until he was laid off.
Garber had written a manuscript, In Search of Shabbiness, as a response to the
Tom Peters best-seller,
In Search of Excellence. On the advice of literary agents, he rewrote it as the novel Rascal Money.
In 1995, his second novel
Vertical Run, a corporate thriller, became an international best-seller. The book's setting is 200
Park Avenue, the address of Booz Allen. It was bought by a
Hollywood studio in the 1990s only to be shelved in pre-production. His third novel, In a Perfect State, was published in 1999. His fourth novel, Whirlwind, with a retired
CIAagent as protagonist, was published in 2004.
Garber died of a
heart attack on May 27, 2005.