Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason photo

Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason

Ian Caldwell is an American novelist. After graduating from Princeton University in 1998, he and his childhood friend Dustin Thomason co-wrote the semi-autobiographical The Rule of Four, which was published in 2004.

Caldwell and Thomason graduated from the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Fairfax County, Virginia, in 1994. Caldwell was a Phi Beta Kappa in history at Princeton. In 2005, Caldwell's wife, Meredith, gave birth to their first child, Ethan Sawyer Caldwell. They live in Vienna, Virginia.


“Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.”
Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason
Read more
“I would sell my last cow for a handful of magical beans”
Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason
Read more
“Love lost is a special kind of failure, I think. It's a reminder that some consummations, no matter how devoutly wished for, never come; that some apes will never be men, not in all the world's ages.”
Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason
Read more
“The adventure of our first days together gradually blossomed into something else: a feeling I'd never had, which I can only compare to the sensation of returning home, of joining a balance that needs no adjusting, as if the scales of my life had been waiting for her all along.”
Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason
Read more
“...we both saw something we liked, a willingness to have no walls, or maybe just an unwillingness to keep them standing.”
Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason
Read more
“That was the recipe of our relationship, I think. We gave each other what we never expected to find.”
Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason
Read more
“...a good friend stands in harm's way for you the second you ask--but a great friend does it without being asked at all.”
Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason
Read more
“Time passed, worlds diverged.”
Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason
Read more
“So ended the formative period in [his] life, the single year that set in motion all the clockwork of his future identity. Thinking back on it, I wonder if it isn't the same for all of us. Adulthood is a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in.”
Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason
Read more
“I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it.”
Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason
Read more