Frank Herbert

American · 1920 to 1986

Born Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. on October 8, 1920, in Tacoma, Washington, to a father who drove a bus and drank, and to a mother whose family had come west to join one of the utopian communes of the Olympic Peninsula in 1905, he ran away from home at eighteen with his younger sister to live with his aunt and uncle in Salem, Oregon. He lied about his age to get his first newspaper job at the Glendale Star and worked for nearly four decades as a reporter and editor at papers up and down the West Coast, including the Oregon Statesman, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A short Navy stint as a photographer ended with a head injury in 1942. After the war he took creative writing at the University of Washington, where he met Beverly Stuart, his second wife, who supported the household for the years he was writing the novel. A 1957 magazine assignment on the Oregon Dunes near Florence, where the U.S. Department of Agriculture was using poverty grasses to halt drifting sand, gave him the desert world that would become Arrakis. Dune (1965), six years in the writing, rejected by more than twenty publishers and finally taken by a Philadelphia auto-repair manual press, has sold more than twenty million copies and remains the best-selling science fiction novel ever published. He continued the saga across five sequels: Dune Messiah (1969), Children of Dune (1976), God Emperor of Dune (1981), Heretics of Dune (1984), and Chapterhouse: Dune (1985). His wife Beverly's death in 1984 broke him. He died of acute pulmonary embolism in Madison, Wisconsin, on February 11, 1986, at sixty-five.