Jack Ryan (character) Jack Ryan (character) John Patrick "Jack" Ryan, Sr. is a fictional character created by author Tom Clancy and featured in his Ryanverse novels, which have consistently topped the New York Times best seller list over 30 years. Since Clancy’s death in 2013, four other authors have continued the Ryan franchise and its other connecting series with the approval of the Clancy family estate: Mark Greaney, Grant Blackwood, Mike Maden, and Marc Cameron. The son of a Baltimore police detective and a nurse, Jack Ryan is a former U.S. Marine and stockbroker who became a history teacher at Boston College in
Tom Clancy its technical accuracy, which led to Clancy's meeting several high-ranking officers in the U.S. military. Clancy's fiction works, "The Hunt for Red October", "Patriot Games" (1987), "Clear and Present Danger" (1989), and "The Sum of All Fears" (1991), have been turned into commercially successful films with actors Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck as Clancy's most famous fictional character, Jack Ryan; his second most famous character, John Clark, has been played by actors Willem Dafoe and Liev Schreiber. All but two of Clancy's solely written novels feature Jack Ryan or John Clark. The Cold War epic "Red Storm Rising"