Tom Clancy life and biography

Thomas Leo "Tom" Clancy Jr. was an American author, best known for his technically detailed espionage, military science and techno thriller storylines set during and in the aftermath of the Cold War, along with video games which he did not work on, but which bear his name for licensing and promotional purposes.

Novelist Tom Clancy popularized the genre of "techno-thrillers," political intrigues mixed with details of modern military technology. A former insurance broker, Clancy became one of the best-selling authors in the United States with novels including The Hunt For Red October (1984), Patriot Games (1988), Clear and Present Danger (1989) and The Sum of All Fears (1991). All featured Clancy's frequent protagonist, Jack Ryan, and all were made into movies. (Ryan was first played by Alec Baldwin, then portrayed twice by Harrison Ford, then by Ben Affleck in the 2002 film of The Sum of All Fears.) Clancy's early novels focused on the Cold War and took a grim view of the Soviet Union, making Clancy doubly popular with politically conservative readers. Clancy is sometimes kidded for his extreme wordiness -- The Sum of All Fears ran 798 pages in hardcover -- but fans stuck with him in the 1990s as the Soviet Union fell apart in real life and Clancy shifted his focus to terrorism and other hot topics. In 1996 he started Red Storm Entertainment, a multimedia company specializing in computer games.

Clancy died on October 1, 2013, of an undisclosed illness at Johns Hopkins Hospital, near his Baltimore home. The Chicago Tribune quoted Pulitzer Prize-winning 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, a lot of people were able to publish such books who had previously been unable to do so."


Author of books:

The Hunt for Red October (1984, novel)
Red Storm Rising (1986, novel, with Larry Bond)
Patriot Games (1987, novel)
Clear and Present Danger (1989, novel)
Sum of All Fears (1991, novel)
Without Remorse (1993, novel)
Debt of Honor (1994, novel)
SSN (1996, novel)
Executive Orders (1996, novel)
Rainbow Six (1998, novel)
The Bear and the Dragon (2000, novel)
Red Rabbit (2002, novel)
Teeth of the Tiger (2003, novel)

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