Frank Herbert

Frank Patrick Herbert (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986) was a critically and commercially successful American science fiction author. He is best known for the novel Dune, and the five other novels in the series that followed it. The Dune saga dealt with themes such as human survival and evolution, ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics, and power.

Biography

Frank Herbert was born in 1920 in Tacoma, Washington. He knew from an early age that he wanted to be a writer, and in 1939 he lied about his age in order to get his first newspaper job on the Glendale Star.

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1920 - Tacoma, Washington - 1939 - Newspaper - Glendale Star

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There was a temporary hiatus to his writing career as he served in the U.S. Navy as a photographer during World War II. He married Flora Parkinson in 1941, but later divorced her in 1945 after fathering a daughter.

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U.S. Navy - World War II - 1941 - 1945

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After the war he attended the University of Washington, where he met Beverly Ann Stuart at a creative writing class in 1946. They were the only students in the class who had sold any work for publication—Herbert had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, and Stuart had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine. They married in Seattle on June 20, 1946. Their first son, Brian Herbert, was born in 1947. Frank Herbert did not graduate from college, according to Brian, because he only wanted to study what interested him and so didn't complete the required courses.

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University of Washington - Creative writing - 1946 - Seattle - June 20 - Brian Herbert - 1947

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After college he returned to journalism and worked at the Seattle Star and the Oregon Statesman; he was also a writer and editor for the San Francisco Examiner's California Living magazine for a decade.

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Seattle Star - Oregon Statesman - San Francisco Examiner's

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Herbert began reading science fiction in the forties and in the 1950s began to write it, with short stories appearing in Startling Stories and other magazines. During the next decade he published nearly 20 short stories.

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Science fiction - Startling Stories

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His career as a novelist began with the publication of The Dragon in the Sea in 1955, where he used the environment of a 21st-century submarine as a way to explore sanity and madness. The book predicted worldwide conflicts over oil consumption and production. It was a critical success but not a major commercial one.

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The Dragon in the Sea - 1955 - Oil

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Herbert began researching Dune in 1959 and was able to devote himself more wholeheartedly to his writing career because his wife returned to work full time as an advertising writer for department stores, becoming the main breadwinner during the sixties. Herbert later related in an interview with Willis E. McNeilly that the novel originated when he was supposed to do a magazine article on sand dunes in Florence, Oregon, but he got too involved in it and ended up with far more raw material than needed for a single article. The article was never written, but it did serve as the seed for the ideas that led to Dune.

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1959 - Florence, Oregon

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After six years of research and writing, Dune was completed by 1965. Far longer than commercial science fiction of the time was supposed to be, it was serialized in Analog magazine in two separate parts, in 1963 and 1965. It was then rejected by nearly twenty book publishers before finally being accepted. One editor prophetically wrote back "I might be making the mistake of the decade, but...," before rejecting the manuscript. But Chilton, a minor publishing house in Philadelphia, gave Herbert a $7500 advance, and Dune was soon a critical success. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965 and shared the Hugo Award in 1966. Dune was the first ecological science fiction novel, containing a multitude of big, inter-relating themes and multiple character viewpoints, a method that ran through all Herbert's mature work.

Related Topics:
1965 - Analog - Nebula Award - Hugo Award - 1966 - Ecological

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The book was not an instant best seller. By 1968 Herbert had made $20,000 from it, far more than most science-fiction novels of the time were generating, but this was not enough to let him take up full-time writing. However, the publication of Dune did open doors for him. He was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's education writer from 1969 to 1972 and lecturer in general and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Washington (1970–2). He worked in Vietnam and Pakistan as social and ecological consultant in 1972. In 1973 he was director-photographer of the television show The Tillers.

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1968 - Seattle Post-Intelligencer's - 1969 - 1972 - 1970 - Vietnam - Pakistan - 1973

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By 1972 he was able to become a full-time writer and during the 1970s and 1980s he enjoyed considerable commercial success as an author. He lived between Hawaii and Washington State. During this time he wrote numerous books and pushed ecological and philosophical ideas. He continued his Dune saga, following it with Dune Messiah, Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune. Other highlights were The Dosadi Experiment, The Godmakers, The White Plague and the books he wrote in partnership with Bill Ransom: The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect and The Ascension Factor.

Related Topics:
Hawaii - Washington - Dune Messiah - Children of Dune - God Emperor of Dune - The Dosadi Experiment - The Godmakers - The White Plague - Bill Ransom - The Jesus Incident - The Lazarus Effect - The Ascension Factor

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But his change in fortune was shaded by tragedy. In 1974, Beverly underwent an operation for cancer that gave her ten more years of life, but adversely affected her health. She died on February 7, 1984. In his afterword to Chapterhouse Dune, Herbert wrote a moving eulogy for his wife.

Related Topics:
1974 - Cancer - February 7 - 1984 - Chapterhouse Dune

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1984 was a tumultuous year in Herbert's life. In the same year that his wife died, his career took off with the release of David Lynch's film version of Dune. Despite high expectations, a big-budget production design and an A-list cast, the movie drew mostly poor reviews in the United States. However, despite a disappointing response in the USA, the film was a critical and commercial success in Europe and Japan. The same year Herbert published the fifth book in the Dune saga, Heretics of Dune, which many readers believe to be as good as Dune itself. Finally, following the death of Beverly, Herbert married Theresa Shackelford later in the year.

Related Topics:
David Lynch - United States - Europe - Japan - Heretics of Dune

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In 1986 Herbert published ', which tied up many of the saga's story threads. This was to be Herbert's final single work — he died of pancreatic cancer on February 11, 1986, in Madison, Wisconsin, at the age of 65.

Related Topics:
Pancreatic cancer - February 11 - 1986 - Madison, Wisconsin

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