DAVID MORRELL

David Morrell is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series, Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette convertible traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.
In 1966, the work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at the Pennsylvania State University and received his M.A. and Ph. D. in American literature. There, he also met the esteemed science-fiction author William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a ground-breaking novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-trauma stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.
That “father” of modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them international bestsellers, including the classic spy trilogy, The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries that premiered after a Super Bowl), The Fraternity of the Stone, and The League of Night and Fog.
Eventually wearying of two professions, Morrell gave up his academic tenure in order to write full time. Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character lost a son.
“The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of thirty-three books, including such high-action thrillers as The Naked Edge, Creepers, and The Spy Who Came for Christmas (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). Always interested in different ways to tell a story, he wrote the six-part comic-book series, Captain America: The Chosen. His writing book, The Successful Novelist, analyzes what he has learned during his four decades as an author.
Morrell is a co-founder of the International Thriller Writers organization. Noted for his research, he is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. He is also an honorary lifetime member of the Special Operations Association and the Association of Intelligence Officers. He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and car fighting, among numerous other action skills that he describes in his novels. To research the aerial sequences in The Shimmer, he became a private pilot.
Morrell is an Edgar and Anthony nominee as well as a three-time recipient of the distinguished Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. The International Thriller Writers organization gave him its prestigious ThrillerMaster Award. With eighteen million copies in print, his work has been translated into twenty-six languages.

abandoned buildings    action    action and adventure    adventure    american cinema    american film    american icon    arthur miller    asbury park    assassins    astrological phenomenon    audie murphy    bereavement    big bands    bioengineering    body guards    book publishing    book to movie    campus protests    cancer    canyon road    carolco pictures    celebrities    celebrity    christmas story    conspiracy    controversial death    coping    creepers    crime    cult    death    delta force    editor    environmentalism    epidemics    espionage    espoinage    excop    family relationship    farming community    fatherson relationship    fear    fiction writing    film star    financial fraud    first blood    frank balenger    french foreign legion    friendship    ghost town    government    government conspiracy    grief    harry james    hightech    historical fiction    horror    howard hawks    internet pornography    james cameron    jd salinger    joe dimaggio    john f kennedy    john ford    john wayne    judy garland    kinseys sexual behavior    linda ronstadt    loss    marfa lights    marilyn monroe    mayhem    medal of honor    medical technology    memoir    mens adventure    mexican revolution    mexico    military    military conspiracy    military fiction    militia group    mithras    monument valley    mourning    murder    musical arrangements    mysterious death    mystery    nat king cole    nelson riddle    new jersey    new mexico    paramilitary group    paranormal    peggy lee    penn state    philip young    playboy magazine    pollution    ponzi scheme    popular music    popular singing    pow    prisoners of war    protective agents    psychological thriller    ralph waldo emerson    rambo    relationships    rosemary clooney    route 66    russian mafia    sam peckinpah    santa fe    science fiction    serial killer    sex symbol    short story    soldiers    soviet afghanistan war    spies    spy    stalkers    stirling silliphant    supernatural    survival    suspense    sylvester stallone    technology    texas    thriller    thrillers    tommy dorsey    tragic death    twentieth century fox    urban exploration    vietnam veteran    vietnam war    virus    war    western    western films    westerns    wild animal    wilderness survival    world war 1    world war ii