Jon Krampner was born on April 9, 1952, in New York City. He grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Robert Krampner and Bernice (Blackman) Krampner and brother of Michael Krampner. There he attended Berkeley Institute, Ditmas Junior High School and Erasmus Hall High School.

He got an A.B. in English Lit. from Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1974 and an M.A. in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1977. He spent the Carter administration getting fired from mostly small and undistinguished newspapers across the west: The Texarkana Gazette (the only one that he quit) in 1978; the Las Vegas Sun, also in 1978; the Ely (Nev.) Daily Times in 1979; and the Sonora (Cal.) Daily Union Democrat (known by its acronym, the Dud), also in 1979.

He then moved to Los Angeles to work for six years (1980-86) in the public information office of the University of Southern California, the longest he ever lasted at a 9 to 5 job.

After six years at USC, he quit. For two years he bounced around and did a little freelance writing, then, in 1988, took a part-time job teaching English as a Second Language in the adult division of the Los Angeles Unified School District. He held this position for 27 years (although at several different schools), retiring in 2015.

Teaching ESL provided him with the economic basis to produce his critically esteemed but non-bestselling books, The Man in the Shadows: Fred Coe and the Golden Age of Television (Rutgers University Press, 1997), Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley (Watson-Guptill/Backstage Books, 2006) Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food (Columbia University Press, 2013) and Joe Wilson: What He Didn't Find in Africa (a 9,000-word eBook, 2015). His next book, Ernest Lehman: The Sweet Smell of Success, is scheduled for publication by the University Press of Kentucky in the fall of 2022.

-adapted from an autobiographical note received August 2021.