Patriots (novel series)
five-novel series by James Wesley Rawles

The Patriots novel series is a five-novel series by survivalist novelist and former U.S. Army officer and blogger, James Wesley Rawles. It is followed by his Counter-Caliphate Chronicles novel series.
Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse, the first book in the series, was first distributed as shareware in 1995 and first published in paperback in 1998. It was updated and re-published in paperback 2009, and then in hardback in 2012. In one week of April 2009, shortly after its release, it was ranked #6 in Amazon.com's overall book sales rankings, which was attributed by the Library Journal to the book's appeal to "a small but vociferous group of people concerned with survivalism".
Set in the near future midst hyperinflation and a catastrophic global economic collapse, Patriots tells the story of a group of survivalists that flee riots and chaos in metropolitan Chicago to a survivalist retreat that they have prepared near Bovill, Idaho.
Origins
The first novel is based on a 19-chapter draft that Rawles wrote in 1990, and first distributed as shareware, under the title The Gray Nineties. It was later expanded to 27 chapters and retitled Triple Ought, and then 33 chapters, under the title TEOTWAWKI: The End of the World as We Know It. In 1997, the rights to the novel were purchased by Huntington House Publishers, a small Christian publishing firm in Lafayette, Louisiana. They abridged the book to 31 chapters and re-titled it Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q133800613. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1995, 1998, 2009 and 2012.
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