Michael Crichton

He is said to have married five times in his lifetime, four of which ended in divorce. His spouses include, Joan Radam, Kathleen St. Johns, Suzanna Childs, Anne-Marie Martin and Sherri Alexander.

With Anne-Marie Martin, he fathered a daughter Taylor Anne. He even fathered a son from Sherri Alexander, John Michael Todd Crichton, but did not live long enough to see him born.

Only after his death, it was found that he was suffering from cancer and had been diagnosed with lymphoma. He was undergoing chemotherapy treatment at the time of his death. He breathed his last on November 4, 2008.

John Michael Crichton was born to John Henderson Crichton and Zula Miller Crichton in Chicago, Illinois.

A prodigious child, he showed an inclination towards writing since an early age. by the age of 14, he even had a travel article published in a column at The New York Times.

To come closer to his dreams of becoming a top-rated writer, he began studying at the Harvard College in 1960. However, due to irreconcilable differences between his professors, he switched to studying biological anthropology.

In 1964, he obtained his bachelor summa cum laude degree and received a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship for a year.

In 1965, he took up the post of a visiting lecturer in anthropology at the University of Cambridge. However, this did not continue for long as he enrolled at the Harvard Medical School where he began publishing work.

It was while at the Harvard Medical School that he began penning novels under the pseudonym, ‘John Lange’, ‘Jeffrey Hudson’ and ‘Michael Douglas’. Some of his earlier books include, ‘Odds On’ his debut venture, ‘Scratch One’, ‘Easy Go’ and Edgar award winning fiction ‘A Case of Need’.

Year 1969 witnessed the release of his three books, ‘Zero Cool’, ‘The Andromeda Strain’ and ‘The Venom Business’. While the first and the third novels were well received, it was ‘The Andromeda Strain’ that earned him critical attention. The novel was an instant success and became one of the best-selling books of the year.

Keeping up with the pace of his work, in 1970, he came up with three more novels, ‘Drug of Choice’, ‘Grave Descend’ and ‘Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues’. While ‘Dealing’ was adapted into a film, Grave Descent earned him his second Edgar nomination.

Two years henceforth, he published two more novels, ‘Binary’ and ‘The Terminal Man’, the latter of which continued his exploration with technology and highlighted machine and human interaction. It was later adapted into a film.

While the reception of his latest released books ranked less than average, it was his 1975 venture, ‘The Great Train Robbery’ that went on to become a bestseller. The book re-described the events that took place during the Great Gold Robbery of 1855. It was later adapted into a film with him as the director.

In his lifetime, he received a couple of awards including, two Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award, Association of American Medical Writers Award, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Technical Achievement Award, Writers Guild of America Award George Foster Peabody Award, Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series and American Association of Petroleum Geologists Journalism Award.

He was enlisted by People’s magazine in the list of ‘Fifty Most Beautiful People’.