Frank Herbert
Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986) was an American science fiction author best known for the 1965 novel Dune and its five sequels. Though he became famous for his novels, he also wrote short stories and worked as a newspaper journalist, photographer, book reviewer, ecological consultant, and lecturer.
The Dune saga, set in the distant future, and taking place over millennia, explores complex themes, such as the long-term survival of the human species, human evolution, planetary science and ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics, economics and power in a future where humanity has long since developed interstellar travel and settled many thousands of worlds. Dune is the best-selling science fiction novel of all time,[2] and the whole series is widely considered to be among the classics of the genre.
Frank Herbert was born on October 8, 1920, in Tacoma, Washington, to Frank Patrick Herbert Sr. and Eileen (née McCarthy) Herbert. His country upbringing involved spending a lot of his youth on the Olympic Peninsula and Kitsap Peninsula.[3] He was fascinated by books and could read much of the newspaper before the age of five, and he had an excellent memory and learned things quickly.[4] He had an early interest in photography, and bought a Kodak box camera at age ten, a new folding camera in his early teens, and a color film camera in the mid-1930s.[5] Because of a poor home environment, largely due to the Great Depression, he ran away from home in 1938 to live with an aunt and uncle in Salem, Oregon.[6] He enrolled in high school at Salem High School (now North Salem High School), where he graduated the next year.[6] In 1939 he lied about his age to get his first newspaper job at the Glendale Star.[7] Herbert then returned to Salem in 1940 where he worked for the Oregon Statesman newspaper (now Statesman Journal) in a variety of positions, including photographer.[6]
He served in the U.S. Navy’s Seabees for six months as a photographer during World War II, then he was given a medical discharge. He married Flora Parkinson in San Pedro, California, in 1940. They had a daughter, Penny (b. February 16, 1942), but divorced in 1945.
After the war, Herbert attended the University of Washington, where he met Beverly Ann Stuart at a creative writing class in 1946. They were the only students who had sold any work for publication; Herbert had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, the first to Esquire in 1945, and Stuart had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine. They married in Seattle, Washington on June 20, 1946, and had two sons, Brian Patrick Herbert (b. June 29, 1947, Seattle, Washington) and Bruce Calvin Herbert (b. June 26, 1951, Santa Rosa, California d. June 15, 1993, San Rafael, California, a professional photographer and gay rights activist.[8])
In 1949 Herbert and his wife moved to California to work on the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. Here they befriended the psychologists Ralph and Irene Slattery. The Slatterys introduced Herbert to the work of several thinkers who would influence his writing, including Freud, Jung, Jaspers and Heidegger; they also familiarized Herbert with Zen Buddhism.[9]
