"Jack Ledger writes like a man chasing ghosts—and catching them."
Jack Ledger is the pen name of Mark Ferland, an American writer who pulls stories from a life spent in hard places and rough miles.
Raised in Alaska, he grew up feral in the long winters and short summers of the Last Frontier — learning early that survival isn’t pretty and loyalty gets tested in the cold. Those years left marks that still show up in his work: brotherhood, bruises, distance, and the way memory refuses to stay buried.
He served in the U.S. Navy aboard a guided missile cruiser, running through typhoons, shadow ops, and the kind of sea stories you don’t tell at reunions. After that came two decades in the business trenches — Los Angeles sales floors, corporate grind, and the Midwest grindstone — all while writing in the cracks between jobs.
Now he writes full-time under the name Jack Ledger. His work mixes raw memoir and historical fiction, grounded in real places and real scars. Current projects include:
Where the Wild Boys Are — a memoir of growing up feral in Alaska
The Navy That Time Forgot — sea stories from two reckless years aboard the Dauntless
The Last Cavalier saga — a gritty historical fiction series set in the Civil War era, following Franco Lacroix from blockade runners and royal bloodlines to Missouri bushwhacker fire and beyond.
Ledger doesn’t romanticize the past. He drags it into the light — blood, bone, smoke, and all — to see what it actually cost the men who lived it.
The stories on this site are built from real places and lived experience, but they are not bound by strict autobiography.
Memory shifts. History leaves gaps. Story fills in the rest.
Across memoir and fiction, the same themes return again and again:
childhood and family
war and aftermath
loyalty, loss, and redemption
the search for meaning after the dust settles
Current work includes the memoir Where the Wild Boys Are, a second memoir centered on naval service in the late Cold War era, and the historical series The Last Cavalier, a long-form saga set during the American Civil War.
These projects are being written slowly, with the goal of getting the story right rather than getting it fast.
More updates will appear here as the work progresses.
© Mark Ferland writing as Jack Ledger. All rights reserved.
Storylines, characters, and universe materials are protected under U.S. Copyright and WGA registration
If you have a question about the books, the research, or the writing, you can reach me here.
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