Jon Krampner was born in the early 1950's in New York City. He grew up in Brooklyn, where 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 and an M.A. in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He spent the Carter administration getting fired from small and undistinguished newspapers across the West: The Texarkana Gazette (the only one that he quit), the Las Vegas Sun, the Ely (Nev.) Daily Times, and the Sonora (Cal.) Daily Union Democrat (known by its acronym, the Dud).

In the '80's, he moved to Los Angeles to work for six years 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 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 more than 25 years, 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 latest book, Ernest Lehman: The Sweet Smell of Success, is being published by the University Press of Kentucky on September 27, 2022.