Clive Cussler
Clive Cussler
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About Clive Cussler
Clive Cussler is an American novelist who writes mostly high action, high adventure tales featuring hero Dirk Pitt. Clive Cussler grew up in Alhambra, California. He attended Pasadena City College for two years, then enlisted in the US Air Force during the Korean War and served as an aircraft mechanic and flight engineer in the Military Air Transport Service. Upon discharge he became a copywriter and, later, creative director at two of the nation's leading ad agencies. He wrote and produced radio and television commercials in Hollywood that won numerous international honors, including an award at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Cussler began writing novels in 1965 and published his first work featuring his continuous series hero, Dirk Pitt, in 1973. His first non-fiction book, The Sea Hunters, was released in 1996. The Board of Governors of the Maritime College, University of New York, considered The Sea Hunters in lieu of a Ph.D. thesis and awarded Cussler a Doctor of Letters degree in May 1997. It was the first time since the College was founded in 1874 that such a degree had been bestowed. Cussler is an internationally recognized authority on shipwrecks and the founder of the National Underwater and Marine Agency, a 501C3 non-profit organization named after the fictional Federal agency in his novels. NUMA dedicates itself to preserving American maritime and naval history. He and his crew of marine experts and NUMA volunteers have discovered more than 60 historically significant underwater wreck sites including the first submarine to sink a ship in battle, the Confederacy's CSS Hunley, and its victim, the Union's USS Housatonic; the U-20, the U-boat that sank the RMS Lusitania; the USS Cumberland, which was sunk by the famous Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia; the renowned Confederate raider CSS Florida; the US Navy airship USS Akron, the Republic of Texas Navy warship Zavala, found under a parking lot in Galveston, and the RMS Carpathia, which sank almost six years to the day after plucking RMS Titanic's survivors from the sea. In September 1998, NUMA - which turns over all artifacts to state and Federal authorities or donates them to museums and universities - launched its own website for those wishing more information about maritime history or wishing to make donations to the organization. In addition to being the Chairman of NUMA, Cussler is also a fellow in both the The Explorers Club in New York and the Royal Geographical Society in London. He has been honored with the Lowell Thomas Award for outstanding underwater exploration. Cussler's books have been published in more than 40 languages in more than 100 countries and have a readership of more than 90 million avid fans. His past international bestsellers include Pacific Vortex, Mediterranean Caper, Iceberg, Raise the Titanic, Vixen 03, Night Probe, Deep Six, Cyclops, Treasure, Dragon, Sahara, Inca Gold, Shock Wave, The Sea Hunters (non-fiction), Flood Tide, and Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt® Revealed. Cussler is also the author, with Paul Kemprecos, of the first in a new Dirk Pitt spinoff series - The NUMA Files. Cussler was married to his wife, Barbara Knight, for more than 44 years. Together, they had three children and two grandchildren. Regrettably, Barbara passed away in January 2003. Cussler is the father of Dirk Cussler, who co-wrote Black Wind (2004) and the December 2006 release Treasure of Khan (2006). Writing The first two Pitt novels, The Mediterranean Caper and Iceberg, were relatively conventional maritime thrillers. The third, Raise the Titanic!, made Cussler's reputation and established the pattern that subsequent Pitt novels would follow: A blend of high adventure and high technology, generally involving megalomaniacal villains, lost ships, beautiful women, and sunken treasure. Cussler's novels, like those of Michael Crichton, are examples of techno-thrillers that do not use military plots and settings. Where Crichton strives for scrupulous realism, however, Cussler prefers fantastic spectacles and outlandish plot devices. The Pitt novels, in particular, have the anything-goes quality of the James Bond or Indiana Jones movies, while also sometimes borrowing from Alistair MacLean's novels. Pitt himself is a two-dimensional, larger-than-life hero reminiscent of Doc Savage and other characters from pulp magazines. Life Imitating Art As an underwater explorer, Cussler has discovered more than 60 shipwreck sites and has written non-fiction books about his findings. He is also the founder of the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), a non-profit organization with the same name as the fictional government agency that employs Dirk Pitt. Cussler owns a large collection of classic cars, several of which (driven by Pitt) appear in his novels. In what started as a joke in the novel Dragon, and that Cussler expected his editor to remove, he now often writes himself into his books, at first as simple cameos, but later as something of a deus ex machina, providing the novel's protagonists with an essential bit of assistance Art Imitating Death His 2001 novel Valhalla Rising featured a sci-fi Viking mythology set in Tarrytown and other locations of the Hudson River Valley of Westchester County, New York. Valhalla, New York is famous for its sea of graveyards near Kensico where many famous personalities are buried. The name of the community came from a 19th Century fan of Richard Wagner and her own interest in Norse mythology. In 1994, Mark Guglielmo drew attention to the connection between Vikings and Valhalla, when he murdered his wife in Florida and then disposed of her bisected corpse twenty miles apart in the Hudson River and at a location near Bedford, while attempting to imitate portions of a Viking funeral. Cinematization The first attempt to film one of Cussler's novels — Raise The Titanic! (1980) — was a critical and commercial failure. Its failure was widely attributed to a weak script and the casting of Richard Jordan as Pitt. Paramount Pictures released Sahara on April 8, 2005, starring Matthew McConaughey as Dirk Pitt, Steve Zahn as Al Giordino, William H. Macy as Admiral Sandecker, and Penélope Cruz as Eva Rojas. Cussler and the studio have filed lawsuits against each other in a disagreement over whether the film departs too severely from the novel.
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