David Morrell

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David Morrell (born 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada) is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created.

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[edit] Biography

"The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions," as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of twenty-eight books, including such novels of international intrigue as The Fifth Profession, Assumed Identity, and Extreme Denial (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he now lives with his wife, Donna). His most recent publication is the dark-suspense thriller Creepers.

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 traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant impressed him so much 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. He studied with Young at Penn State University and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American literature. He also met the distinguished fiction writer William Tenn, who taught him the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, published in 1972, a novel about a troubled Vietnam veteran who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief. A version of the Vietnam War then erupts in the forests, hills, and caves of rural Kentucky. Immensely popular and controversial, First Blood became known as the father of all modern action novels, entering popular culture.

From 1970 to 1986, Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. After the success of First Blood, he continued writing other novels, many of them national bestsellers, such as The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a highly rated NBC miniseries starring Robert Mitchum). Eventually tiring of two professions, he gave up his tenure in order to write full time.

Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. He died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell's life but his work, as can be seen in his memoir about his son, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character has lost a son.

Morrell is the co-founder and co-president (with Gayle Lynds) of the International Thriller Writers organization (www.thrillerwriters.org). 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 Former Intelligence Officers. He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and anti-terrorist driving, among numerous other action skills that he describes in his novels. With eighteen million copies in print, his work has been translated into twenty-six languages.

Morrell has recently been tapped by Marvel Comics to pen a six-issue mini series set around the Gulf War and one of their most prolific icons, Captain America.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Fiction

[edit] Nonfiction

  • 1976 John Barth: An Introduction
  • 1988 Fireflies
  • 2002 Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing: A Novelist Looks at His Craft

[edit] External links

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