Walter Wager was born in The Bronx, New York City, the son of a doctor and a nurse who had emigrated from the Russian Empire. A 1944 graduate of Columbia College, where he was a member of the Philolexian Society, he went on to a Harvard Law School degree three years later. Passing the bar exams but choosing not to practice, he went on to receive a master's degree in aviation law from Chicago's Northwestern University in 1949, while also serving as an editor of the Journal of Air Law and Commerce, then based in that city.
Afterward, he spent a year at the Sorbonne, in Paris, as a Fulbright Fellow. He spent a year in Israel as an aviation-law consultant for the Israeli Department of Civil Aviation, helping to negotiate a treaty on air space and working out of Lydda Airport in Tel Aviv. In 1952, he returned to New York City, where he worked for the United Nations, editing documents.
Shortly afterward, Wager segued into writing and producing radio and television documentaries for CBS and NBC, and the United States Information Agency, while also beginning a side career as a freelance writer for magazines including Playbill and Show. Under the pseudonym John Tiger, he wrote the paperback original Death Hits the Jackpot (Avon #605) for Avon Books, the fifth publisher he contacted; published in 1954, it paid him $3,000. He recalled in 2000, "I had a friend at a paperback publishing house. I like mystery stories so I thought I could sell this kind of prose." For several years he worked as a freelance writer.

Return to Walter Wager Autograph Profile