After Beverly passed away, Frank married Theresa Shackelford. Theirs was a remarkable, though tragic, love story-which Brian would poignantly describe one day in Dreamer of Dune (Tor Books April 2003).
They were in fact a writing team, as he discussed every aspect of his stories with her, and she edited his work. In order to pay the bills and to allow her husband the freedom he needed in order to create, Beverly gave up her own creative writing career in order to support his. For more than two decades Frank and Beverly would struggle to make ends meet, and there were many hard times. Frank also had a daughter, Penny, born in 1942 from his first marriage. Their marriage would produce two sons, Brian, born in 1947, and Bruce, born in 1951. These genres reflected the interests of the two young lovers he the adventurer, the strong, machismo man, and she the romantic, exceedingly feminine and soft-spoken. Beverly had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine. Frank had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, one to Esquire and the other to Doc Savage. At the time, they were the only students in the class who had sold their work for publication. Having been divorced from his first wife, Flora Parkinson, Frank Herbert met Beverly Stuart at a University of Washington creative writing class in 1946. His loving wife of 37 years, Beverly, was the breadwinner much of the time, as an underpaid advertising writer for department stores. It took him six years of research and writing to complete Dune, and after all that struggle and sacrifice, 23 publishers rejected it in book form before it was finally accepted. He was so independent that he refused to write for a particular market he wrote what he felt like writing. For years he had a hard time making a living, bouncing from job to job and from town to town. He did not graduate from college because he refused to take the required courses for a major he only wanted to study what interested him. His curiosity and independent spirit got him into trouble more than once when he was growing up, and caused him difficulties as an adult as well.
DUNE AUDIO BOOK HOW TO
If his classmates wanted to know the answer to something, such as about sexual functions or how to make a carbide cannon, they would invariably say, "Let's ask Herbert. In grade school he was the acknowledged authority on everything. A kid that small shouldn't be so smart." Young Frank was not unlike Alia in Dune, a person having adult comprehension in a child's body.
On his eighth birthday, Frank stood on top of the breakfast table at his family home and announced, "I wanna be a author." His maternal grandfather, John McCarthy, said of the boy, "It's frightening. Wells, Jules Verne, and the science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
He loved Rover Boys adventures, as well as the stories of H.G. He carried around a Boy Scout pack with books in it, and he was always reading. It has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold almost 20 million copies.Īs a child growing up in Washington State, Frank Herbert was curious about everything. Today the novel is more popular than ever, with new readers continually discovering it and telling their friends to pick up a copy. His magnum opus is a reflection of this, a classic work that stands as one of the most complex, multi-layered novels ever written in any genre. He was a man of many facets, of countless passageways that ran through an intricate mind. Frank Herbert (1920-1986) created the most beloved novel in the annals of science fiction, Dune.