Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton (1942-2008) was an American novelist, screenwriter and film director, author of techno-thrillers such as The Andromeda Strain (1969) and Jurassic Park (1990) and creator of the television drama ER.

John Michael Crichton was born on 23 October 1942 in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard College summa cum laude in 1964 and from Harvard Medical School in 1969, then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute, but never practised medicine. As a student he wrote thrillers under the names John Lange and Jeffery Hudson; A Case of Need (1968), published as Hudson, won the Edgar Award. The Andromeda Strain came out in 1969, the year he took his medical degree.

Later novels include Eaters of the Dead (1976) and Congo (1980), Sphere (1987), Jurassic Park (Knopf, October 1990), The Lost World (1995), Timeline (1999), Prey (2002) and State of Fear (2004). He also wrote and directed the film Westworld (1973) and created ER, which ran from 1994 to 2009. His books have sold more than 200 million copies, and over a dozen have been filmed, most famously Jurassic Park in 1993. He published 25 novels in his lifetime; four more appeared after his death in Los Angeles on 4 November 2008, beginning with Pirate Latitudes (HarperCollins, 2009).

For collectors. The first edition of Jurassic Park was published by Alfred A. Knopf in October 1990, and the novel had sold about nine million copies by 1993, the year of the film. His early pseudonymous paperbacks as John Lange and Jeffery Hudson form a distinct strand of his work.