Don Pendleton (December 12, 1927 - October 23, 1995) was a pulp fiction writer, best known for the creation of American hero Mack Bolan. The series made the Men's Action-Adventure genre popular in the 1960s/70s and got him the nickname "the father of action adventure". The Mack Bolan novels penned by Pendleton revolved around Bolan's one man war against the mafia, beginning with War Against the Mafia in 1969, and ending with Satan's Sabbath in 1980. After "Satan's Sabbath," Pendleton sold the rights to his work to the Harlequin publishing group. The first of the non-Pendleton written Mack Bolan books was The New War by Saul Wernick, which started Bolan's fight against terrorism. More recently, Harlequin has begun to produce new novels written by an anonymous team of writers (though their names rarely appear on the books, their identities have been revealed over time), pushing the number of Mack Bolan novels into the hundreds; all of them bear the byline, "Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan." Other works by Pendleton include the Joe Copp and Ashton Ford Series.

Pendleton served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, serving in all theaters of the war. His enlistment ended in November of 1947. He returned to active duty in 1952 during the Korean War and served until 1954.He worked as a telegrapher for the Southern Pacific Railroad until 1957, and then as an air traffic control specialist for the Federal Aviation Administration. In the 1960s, he worked for Martin Marietta on the Titan missile program. He later served as an engineering administrator at NASA during the Apollo missions. Pendleton also worked on the C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft program.

Pendleton's Mack Bolan stretched the limits of believability, as Bolan was responsible for killing literally hundreds of mobsters over the course of the series, dispatching of them in ways that ranged from the conventional (shooting, hand-to-hand combat) to the ludicrous (high-powered military weaponry such as rocket launchers, utilized in the inner city). In the earlier novels, Pendleton did not apparently accurately research the weaponry he described Bolan as using (for example, having Bolan use a .444 Marlin, a weapon with a high, curving trajectory and an effective range of 150 yards, to kill several mobsters from nearly a half mile away). As the novels progressed, Pendleton apparently put more research into his books to make for more accurate descriptions of weapons and their usage.

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