He transferred to the University of Texas at Austin and studied English and History. He graduated from Alamo Heights High School, and first attended the music program at North Texas State University, wanting to be a guitarist. Riordan was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas.

Riordan at the 2007 Texas Book Festival with advance publicity for The Battle of the Labyrinth His third standalone novel, The Sun and the Star, co-written with author Mark Oshiro, is set to be released on May 2, 2023. In 2021, he published Daughter of the Deep. Riordan also helped Scholastic Press develop The 39 Clues series and its spinoffs, and penned its first book, The Maze of Bones. Since then, Riordan has written The Heroes of Olympus, a sequel to the Percy Jackson series The Kane Chronicles, a trilogy of similar premise focusing on Egyptian mythology and Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, again a trilogy of similar premise focusing on Norse mythology. His big breakthrough was The Lightning Thief (2005), the first novel in the five-volume Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, which placed a group of modern-day adolescents in a Greco- Roman mythological setting. Riordan's first full-length novel was Big Red Tequila, which became the first book in the Tres Navarre series.

His books have spawned related media, such as graphic novels and short story collections. 20th Century Fox adapted the first two books of his Percy Jackson series as part of a series of films, while a Disney+ adaptation is in production. Riordan's books have been translated into forty-two languages and sold more than thirty million copies in the United States. ( / ˈ r aɪər d ə n/ RIRE-dən born June 5, 1964) is an American author, best known for writing the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard trilogy.Percy Jackson & the Olympians pentalogy.

The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan