Childhood and education
Don Nardo was born in Columbia, Missouri.
With his younger brother, Philip (born 1949), Nardo spent the first few years of his life on the road as his parents, who were popular nightclub entertainers, traveled throughout the country.
In the early 1950s, the family settled in Natick, Massachusetts, where Nardo was at first home-schooled but later attended the local public schools. As he grew older, he developed an interest in many of the fields he would later pursue professionally, including acting, music, history, and writing. In high school, he performed in numerous plays and was voted best actor in his senior class.. Outside of school, he learned to play the trumpet and began composing chamber and orchestral music, including a four-movement symphony at age fourteen. However, having little formal musical training, he was initially unable to notate these pieces properly, so in the next few years he taught himself to do so by studying books on orchestration.
After graduating from high school in 1965, Nardo majored in theater at Syracuse University, but left after a few semesters to pursue an acting career in New York City. Later, in the 1970s, he returned to school, obtaining a degree in history from Worcester State College (and graduating magna cum laude).
Early professional work
As a young character actor, Nardo appeared in numerous stage productions, including work in summer stock in upstate New York and dinner theater in the American South.. He also worked with the National Shakespeare Company under producer-director Philip Meister, including productions of Macbeth, Othello, and As You Like It. Later, Nardo's theatrical interests shifted more to writing screenplays and teleplays. While working on his first few scripts, he taught high school social studies and English in Barnstable, Massachusetts. One of these screenplays, The Bet, won a $5,000 award from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation in 1982. Among the teleplays was an episode of ABC’s For Hire, starring Robert Urich. Titled “Skeletons in the Closet,” it guest starred E.G. Marshall and Boyd Gaines. Nardo also co-wrote, produced and directed a low-budget feature film, In Deadly Heat, which was distributed as Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator by Troma Entertainment and released to the video market in 1990 by Media Home Entertainment.
Writing career
Although Nardo had avidly studied history informally since childhood and had acquired a degree in history in the 1970s, he did not begin writing history books until the 1980s. A chance assignment by a Boston-based publisher to write several chapters of a new high-school-level history textbook led to offers from several young adult publishers. In the years that followed, the offers kept coming, as did positive reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, and other noted journals. He joined the Association of Ancient Historians in the 1990s. And by 2004, he had penned more than a hundred books about the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and other ancient peoples. In that same year, noted classical historian Victor Davis Hanson stated online: “There is an entire series of great children’s books [about ancient history] by Don Nardo, who has emerged as the premier practitioner of that important craft.”At the request of Chelsea House, Scholastic, Lucent Books, Compass Point Books, Morgan Reynolds, and other publishers, Nardo also wrote numerous books about medieval civilization, among them a biography of the eccentric Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe that won a special commendation by the National Science Teacher’s Association. In addition, he fulfilled numerous requests to write books about modern history, including several studies of Native American culture, America’s wars, and the U.S. founders and their writings.
Music
Meanwhile, Nardo continued to compose music, including a second symphony; concertos for violin, cello, piano, clarinet, French horn, and trumpet; four string quartets; a musical tribute to Thomas Jefferson; incidental music for stage plays, including a large-scale school production of The Hobbit, for which he also conducted the pit orchestra; several romances arranged for strings or orchestra; an oratorio based on the King Arthur legends, and other works. In 1987 the Cape Symphony Orchestra commissioned him to compose a concert piece for children based on H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. A more recent commission came from renowned Portuguese guitarist Paulo Soares and versatile Portuguese violinist Peter M. Ferreira...a double concerto for violin and Portuguese guitar, the first major concert piece ever written for the latter instrument. Nardo is presently the resident composer and arranger for Ferreira’s Connecticut-based Amadis Orchestra.
