Tom Clancy: Books, Biography, Characters, Films, the Division, Games - Author Interview (2002)

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Thomas Leo "Tom" Clancy, Jr. (April 12, 1947 -- October 1, 2013) was an American novelist and historian best known for his technically detailed espionage and military science storylines set during and in the aftermath of the Cold War, and for video games that bear his name for licensing and promotional purposes. Seventeen of his novels were bestsellers, and more than 100 million copies of his books are in print.[1] His name was also a brand for similar movie scripts written by ghost writers and non-fiction books on military subjects. He was a part-owner of the Baltimore Orioles and Vice Chairman of their Community Activities and Public Affairs committees. 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.[1][3] The publisher was impressed with the work; Deborah Grosvenor, the Naval Institute Press editor who read through the work, 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," and considered that Clancy had an "innate storytelling ability, and his characters had this very witty dialogue".[1] The publisher requested Clancy to cut numerous technical details, amounting to about 100 pages.[1] Clancy, who had wanted to sell 5,000 copies, ended up selling over 45,000.[3][8] After publication, the book received praise from President Ronald Reagan, calling 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.[1][3][7] The book was critically praised for its technical accuracy, which led to Clancy's meeting several high-ranking officers in the U.S. military.[1] Clancy's fiction 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 with actors Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck as Clancy's most famous fictional character Jack Ryan, while his second most famous character, John Clark, has been played by actors Willem Dafoe and Liev Schreiber. All but two of Clancy's solely written novels feature Jack Ryan or John Clark. The first NetForce novel (titled Net Force and published in 1999) was adapted as a television movie, starring Scott Bakula and Joanna Going. The first Op-Center novel was released to coincide with a 1995 NBC television mini-series of the same name (Tom Clancy's Op-Center published in 1995) starring Harry Hamlin and a cast of stars. Though the mini-series did not continue, the book series did, but it had little in common with the first mini-series other than the title and the names of the main characters. With the release of The Teeth of the Tiger (2003), Clancy introduced Jack Ryan's son and two nephews as main characters; these characters continued in his last four novels, Dead or Alive (2010), Locked On (2011), Threat Vector (2012), and Command Authority (2013). Clancy wrote several nonfiction books about various branches of the U.S. Armed Forces (see non-fiction listing, below). Clancy also branded several lines of books and video games with his name that are written by other authors, following premises or storylines generally in keeping with Clancy's works. These are sometimes referred to by fans as "apostrophe" books; Clancy did not initially acknowledge that these series were being authored by others; he only thanked the actual authors in the headnotes for their "invaluable contribution to the manuscript". By 1988, Clancy had earned $1.3 million for The Hunt for Red October and had signed a $3 million contract for his next three books.[9] By 1997, it was reported that Penguin Putnam Inc. (part of Pearson Education) would pay Clancy $50 million for world rights to two new books, and another $25 million to Red Storm Entertainment for a four-year book/multimedia deal.[10] Clancy followed this up with an agreement with Penguin's Berkley Books for 24 paperbacks to tie in with the ABC television miniseries Tom Clancy's Net Force aired in the fall/winter of 1998. The Op-Center universe has laid the ground for the series of books written by Jeff Rovin, which was in an agreement worth $22 million, bringing the total value of the package to $97 million.[10] In 1993, Clancy joined a group of investors that included Peter Angelos and bought the Baltimore Orioles from Eli Jacobs.[11][12] In 1998, he reached an agreement to purchase the Minnesota Vikings but had to abandon the deal because of a divorce settlement cost. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_clancy Image By Gary Wayne Gilbert (Flickr) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons