Not unlike John Grisham, Chicago-born author-turned-director/screenwriter Michael Crichton took current events - often with a wealth of "authenticating" detail - and melded them with meticulously-constructed, gripping narratives that made him a white-hot commodity and a veritable one-man industry in Hollywood; Crichton's topical forte, however, lay not in the legal arena but in that of cutting-edge science. The son of an Advertising Age executive editor, Crichton grew up as the oldest in a family with four children, and reportedly (as one who reached 6' 7" at age 13 and grew to a towering height of 6', 9" as an adult) felt socially awkward and a bit out of place. Recreationally, he immersed himself in pop-culture and fell in love with Hitchcock. He entered Harvard as an undergraduate, and then Harvard Medical School, where he began turning out sensationalistic novels under various pseudonyms and used those efforts to pay his tuition (despite criticism from at least one literary professor that his work was shallow and commercial). He graduated from med school in 1969, but by that time began to realize that a traditional medical career would be an ill fit, given his imaginative and creative leanings.

No matter - for that same year, Crichton published a bestselling novel which ensured that he would never have to work again. The Andromeda Strain, a suspense-heavy science fiction thriller about an outer-space virus run amok on Earth, shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list and turned the heads of execs at Universal Studios in Hollywood, who promptly optioned the rights to the film and turned it into a hit feature directed by Robert Wise (…  » Read more