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 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 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 Penn State and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American
literature. There, he also met the distinguished fiction writer
William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the
basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood,
a 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 all 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 national bestsellers, such as The
Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a highly rated
NBC miniseries starring Robert Mitchum). Eventually wearying
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 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 has lost a son.
"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.
Morrell is the co-president of the International Thriller Writers organization (www.internationalthrillerwriters.com). 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.
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