Biography Essay

Born in Tacoma, Washington, Frank Patrick Herbert is best known as the author of the Dune series. He attended the University of Washington in Seattle (1946-1947), where he later lectured (1970-1972), and worked for many years as a journalist for West Coast newspapers from San Francisco to Seattle and at a wide range of other jobs, including oyster diver and jungle survival instructor; but his experiences in the U.S. Navy during World War II and as a lay analyst have had the greatest effect on his fiction. His first science-fiction story, "Looking for Something," was published in Startling Stories in 1952; The Dragon in the Sea, his first novel, was published in 1956. The enormous success of Dune (1965) enabled him in 1966 to write full-time, and he ultimately published twenty-three novels (including one that is not science fiction), five collections of short stories, two nonfiction books, and two...