Gann's autobiography, A Hostage to Fortune (1978), refers to his father's predilection for reading romances, and occasional allusions in his own works suggest a wide and eclectic reading.

His fictional plots and stories perhaps derive from action-adventure tales, although he often plays down extreme melodrama to increase the suspense and sense of reality. Specific parallels might include works like John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy (1996) or Manhattan Transfer (1925), which also make use of shifting points of view between many varied characters and of a similar documentary realism, although Dos Passos's scope is considerably greater than the single action of The High and the Mighty. Clearly, too, the book forms part of the tradition of disaster novels, especially in aviation, following Nevil Shute's No Highwa y (1948) and preced ing Arthur Hailey's Airport (1968).

Perhaps even more important, though, to Gann (as, indeed, to most contemporary writers) has been...