Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton is one of the most successful and topselling authors today. His name recognition, in part because of the number of movies made from his books, rivals Stephen King.

Crichton was born in Chicago in 1942 where he lived for most of his childhood. He was a star basketball player in high school and went to Harvard to become a writer. However, Harvard was unkind to him as a writer, his style was consistently criticized and downgraded. He switched to anthropology after submitting a George Orwell essay and getting only a B- on it.

Crichton enjoyed success as an anthropologist, becoming a visiting lecturer at Cambridge in England and winning fellowships that allowed him to travel in North Africa and Europe. He eventually returned to Harvard and earned a medical doctorate.

To pay his way through medical school, Crichton began publishing thrillers under the assumed names of John Lange and Jeffery Hudson. The book written as Hudson, A Case of Need, won an Edgar Award for the Best Mystery of the Year.

Before he was able to launch his medical career, he published The Andromeda Strain, a novel that quickly became a bestseller and was sold to Hollywood. Many novels followed and Crichton has become known as the father of the "techno-thriller," books which contain hard science and technology with tightly plotted suspenseful stories.

Bibliography

A Case of Need	Rising Sun
Airframe	Scratch One
Binary	Sphere
Congo	The Andromeda Strain
Disclosure	The Great Train Robbery
Drug of Choice	The Lost World
Easy Go	The Terminal Man
Eaters of the Dead	The Venom Business
Electronic Life	Timeline
Five Patients	Travels
Grave Descent	Twister
Jasper Johns	Westworld
Jurassic Park	Zero Cool
Odds On	State of Fear
Prey