Early life and education[edit]
John Michael Crichton ("rhymes with frighten")[3] was born on October 23, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois,[4][5][6][7] to John Henderson Crichton, a journalist, and Zula Miller Crichton. He was raised on Long Island, in Roslyn, New York[3] and showed a keen interest in writing from a young age; at 14, he had a column related to travel published in The New York Times.[1] Crichton had always planned on becoming a writer and began his studies atHarvard College in 1960.[1] During his undergraduate study in literature, he conducted an experiment to expose a professor who he believed was giving him abnormally low marks and criticizing his literary style.[8]:4 Informing another professor of his suspicions,[9]Crichton submitted an essay by George Orwell under his own name. The paper was returned by his unwitting professor with a mark of "B−".[10][11] His issues with the English department led Crichton to switch his undergraduate concentration; he obtained his bachelor's degree in biological anthropology summa cum laude in 1964[12] and was initiated into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.[12] He received a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship from 1964 to 1965 and was a visiting lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom in 1965.[12]
Crichton later enrolled at Harvard Medical School, when he began publishing work.[8][page needed] By this time he had become exceptionally tall; by his own account he was approximately 6 feet 9 inches (2.06 m) tall in 1997.[13][14] In reference to his height, while in medical school, he began writing novels under the pen names "John Lange"[15] and "Jeffrey Hudson"[16] ("Lange" is a surname in Germany, meaning "long", and Sir Jeffrey Hudson was a famous 17th-century dwarf in the court of Queen consort Henrietta Maria of England).
He later described his Lange books in the following way: "My feeling about the Lange books is that my competition is in-flight movies. One can read the books in an hour and a half, and be more satisfactorily amused than watching Doris Day. I write them fast and the reader reads them fast and I get things off my back."[17][18]
In Travels he recalls overhearing doctors, who were unaware that he was the author, discussing the flaws in his book The Andromeda Strain.[8][page needed]
A Case of Need, written under the Hudson pseudonym, won him his first Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1969.[19]
He also co-authored Dealing: or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1970) with his younger brother Douglas, under the shared pen name "Michael Douglas". The back cover of that book carried a picture, taken by their mother, of Michael and Douglas when very young.[citation needed]
During his clinical rotations at the Boston City Hospital, Crichton grew disenchanted with the culture there, which appeared to emphasize the interests and reputations of doctors over the interests of patients.[8][page needed] He graduated from Harvard, obtaining an MDin 1969,[20] and undertook a post-doctoral fellowship study at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, from 1969 to 1970.[citation needed] He never obtained a license to practice medicine, devoting himself to his writing career instead.
Reflecting on his career in medicine years later, Crichton concluded that patients too often shunned responsibility for their own health, relying on doctors as miracle workers rather than advisors. He experimented with astral projection, aura viewing, and clairvoyance, coming to believe that these included real phenomena that scientists had too eagerly dismissed as paranormal.[8][page needed]
In 1988, Crichton was a visiting writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[21
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