Frank Herbert was born on October 8, 1920, in Tacoma, Washington. He began his career as a journalist when he was seventeen. From 1946 to 1947 Herbert attended the University of Washington. During the 1950s he sold several stories to science fiction magazines, and in 1956 his first novel, The Dragon in the Sea, was published by Doubleday. He worked for the San Francisco Examiner newspaper for ten years, and while there he wrote the stories that would become his most famous novel, Dune. "Dune World" was serialized from December 1963 to February 1964 in Astounding Science-Fiction magazine. The serialization of "The Prophet of Dune" followed (January to May 1965) in the same magazine. These stories were revised, expanded, and combined to form Dune, which was published in 1965 by Chilton, a company that was known for publishing how-to books, not science fiction.

Dune was rejected by over twenty publishers before its acceptance...