A magazine piece about Oregon sand dunes grew into Frank Herbert's Dune
Frank Herbert was sent to write an article on the Oregon Dunes near Florence and gathered so much material that the piece never appeared. Instead the idea grew, over six years of research and writing, into Dune, a novel nearly twenty publishers turned down before an auto-manual house took a chance.
Born on October 8, 1920, in Tacoma, Washington, Herbert grew up partly on the rural Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas. He could read much of a newspaper before turning five and bought his first Kodak box camera at ten. At 18 he left his parents' troubled home to live with a favourite aunt. He lied about his age to land a first newspaper job at the Glendale Star and spent years in journalism, never finishing college because he preferred studying only what interested him.
His first science fiction story, Looking for Something, ran in Startling Stories in April 1952. Research for Dune began in 1959, made possible because his wife Beverly went back to full-time work writing department-store advertising and supported the family through the 1960s. Analog serialised it in two runs, Dune World starting in December 1963, then Prophet of Dune in 1965. One of the many editors who rejected it wrote that he might be making the mistake of the decade.
Sterling E. Lanier at Chilton, a firm known mostly for car-repair manuals, offered a 7,500 dollar advance, and Herbert rewrote much of the text. Dune won the Nebula for Best Novel in 1965 and shared the 1966 Hugo with Roger Zelazny's And Call Me Conrad. Sales built slowly, yet by 1968 it had paid him 20,000 dollars, far beyond most genre novels then. The Fremen's desert ecology drew on his environmental work in Oregon, echoing real techniques for managing shifting sand.
By the end of 1972 he had quit newspapers to write fiction full-time, dividing his life between Hawaii and a Port Townsend home meant as an ecological demonstration project. Beverly died on February 7, 1984, the same year David Lynch's film of Dune drew poor American reviews but did well in Europe and Japan. He finished Chapterhouse: Dune in 1985 and died on February 11, 1986, aged 65, in Madison, Wisconsin.
Source: Frank Herbert
