TOM CLANCY, AMERICAN NOVELS ABOUT THE COLD WAR

Today, The Grandma has been reading The Hunt for Red October, an interesting thriller novel written by Tom Clancy, the American novelist, who was born on a day like today in 1947.

Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. (April 12, 1947-October 1, 2013) was an American novelist. He is best known for his technically detailed espionage and military-science storylines set during and after the Cold War.

Seventeen of his novels have been bestsellers and more than 100 million copies of his books have been sold. His name was also used on movie scripts written by ghostwriters, nonfiction books on military subjects occasionally with co-authors, and video games. He was a part-owner of his hometown Major League Baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles of the American League, and vice-chairman of their community activities and public affairs committees.

Originally an insurance agent, his literary career began in 1984 when he sold his first military thriller novel The Hunt for Red October for $5,000 published by the small academic Naval Institute Press of Annapolis, Maryland.

His works The Hunt for Red October (1984), Patriot Games (1987), Clear and Present Danger (1989), and The Sum of All Fears (1991) have been turned into commercially successful films.

Tom Clancy's works also inspired games such as the Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, The Division, and Splinter Cell series. Since Clancy's death in 2013, the Jack Ryan series has been continued by his family estate through a series of authors.

More information: Tom Clancy

Clancy was born on April 12, 1947, at Franklin Square Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in the Northwood neighborhood in northeast Baltimore. The family was Irish-American. He was the second of three children to Thomas Clancy, who worked for the United States Postal Service, and Catherine Clancy, who worked in a store's credit department. He was a member of Troop 624 of the Boy Scouts of America.

Clancy's mother worked to send him to the private Catholic secondary school taught by the Jesuit religious order (Society of Jesus), Loyola High School in Towson, Maryland, from which he graduated in 1965. He then attended the associated Loyola College (now Loyola University Maryland) in Baltimore, graduating in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in English literature. While at Loyola College, he was president of the chess club.

He joined the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps; however, he was ineligible to serve due to his myopia (nearsightedness), which required him to wear thick eyeglasses.

After graduating, Clancy worked for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.

In 1973, Clancy joined the O. F. Bowen Agency, a small insurance agency based in Owings, Maryland, founded by his wife's grandfather.

In 1980, he purchased the insurance agency from his wife's grandmother and wrote novels in his spare time. While working at the insurance agency, he wrote his debut novel, The Hunt for Red October (1984).

Clancy's literary career began in 1982 when he started writing The Hunt for Red October, which in 1984 he sold for publishing to the Naval Institute Press for $5,000.

More information: Publishers Weekly

The publisher was impressed with the work; Deborah Grosvenor, the Naval Institute Press editor who read through the book, said later that she convinced the publisher: I think we have a potential best seller here, and if we don't grab this thing, somebody else would. She believed Clancy had an innate storytelling ability, and his characters had this very witty dialogue.

Clancy, who had hoped to sell 5,000 copies, ended up selling over 45,000. After publication, the book received praise from President Ronald Reagan, who called the work the best yarn, subsequently boosting sales to 300,000 hardcover and 2 million paperback copies of the book, making it a national bestseller.

The book was critically praised for its technical accuracy, which led to Clancy meeting several high-ranking officers in the U.S. military including Steve Pieczenik, and to inspiration for reoccurring characters in his works.

Clancy's novels focus on the hero, most notably Jack Ryan and John Clark, both Irish Catholics like himself. He repeatedly uses the formula whereby the heroes are highly skilled, disciplined, honest, thoroughly professional, and only lose their cool when incompetent politicians or bureaucrats get in their way. Their unambiguous triumphs over evil provide symbolic relief from the legacy of the Vietnam War.

The Cold War epic Red Storm Rising (1986) was co-written, according to Clancy in the book's foreword, with fellow military-oriented author Larry Bond. The book was published by Putnam and sold almost a million copies within its first year.

Clancy became the cornerstone of a publishing list by Putnam which emphasized authors like Clancy who would produce annually. His publisher, Phyllis E. Grann, called these repeaters.

Clancy died on October 1, 2013, at Johns Hopkins Hospital, near his Baltimore home.

The Chicago Tribune quoted Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic and author Stephen Hunter as saying, When he published The Hunt for Red October, he redefined and expanded the genre, and as a consequence of that, many people were able to publish such books who had previously been unable to do so.

More information: The Guardian

The control of information is something the elite always does,
particularly in a despotic form of government.
Information, knowledge, is power.
If you can control information, you can control people.

Tom Clancy