These days, Michael Crichton is best known as the author of Jurassic Park. But even before the massive success of that novel-cum-movie, he was already a bestselling author with more than a dozen films either adapted from his books or made based on his screenplays—several of which he directed himself.
Born in Chicago and raised on Long Island, Crichton was interested in becoming a writer from a young age. By the time he was 16, he had already been published in The New York Times, and by 18 he was studying literature at Harvard. While there, however, he found himself at odds with some of the faculty, specifically when he hatched a scheme to expose a professor who, he believed, was grading him unfairly.
Informing a different professor of his plans, Crichton submitted an essay under his own name that was actually written by George Orwell. It received a B-minus. “Now Orwell was a wonderful writer,” Crichton later said, “and if a B-minus was all he could get, I thought I’d better drop English as my major.”
He subsequently switched his major to biological anthropology and later went to Harvard Medical School, where he obtained his M.D. While these subjects would continue to inform his writing throughout Crichton’s career, however, writing was his first love, and he had begun publishing novels under a pen name while he was still in medical school. He never practiced medicine, in part because, by the time he graduated from medical school, he had already won an Edgar Award and written his first bestselling novel, 1969’s The Andromeda Strain.
Crichton continued writing novels under pseudonyms, but The Andromeda Strain, the first novel published under his own name, proved to be a breakout moment for him. By 1971, it had been adapted into a film directed by Robert Wise, marking the first of many times that Crichton’s name would appear in movie credits. By 1973, Crichton had created a hit film of his own in the form of Westworld, which would later lend its name and themes to a 2016 TV series and which established a pattern that would also define Crichton’s biggest hit.
More bestsellers—and more movies—followed, leading to Crichton’s publication of Jurassic Park in 1990 and its subsequent adaptation by Steven Spielberg, which became one of the biggest blockbusters of all time and kicked off a series of sequels that are still going strong.
Jurassic Park is only one of the nearly 50 credits that Crichton has on IMDb, however, and his career, which ended with his death in 2008 at the age of 66, left him one of the most successful writers of the modern age. Besides a wide array of awards (including a Primetime Emmy for his work on the long-running TV series ER), Crichton has the unique distinction of having a dinosaur named after him—the ankylosaurid Chrichtonpelta benxiensis.
6 Must-Read Michael Crichton Books for SFF Fans
The Andromeda Strain
Michael Crichton’s sixth published novel (and the first published under his own name), The Andromeda Strain proved to be a breakout hit and established what we’ve all sort of come to expect from a Michael Crichton novel. In it, a recovered military satellite carries a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism which causes almost instant blood clotting. When the microorganism wipes out an entire town in Arizona, the government assembles a team of scientists to try to contain the outbreak. Like many of Crichton’s most popular books, it’s a tense thriller that is intensely interested in the minutiae of its scientific themes, prefiguring much of Crichton’s subsequent success both on the page and on the screen.
Jurassic Park
Released 21 years after The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park proved to be Crichton’s biggest hit, both in print and on film. Like many of his novels, this story of an amusement park built around recreated dinosaurs is a thriller based heavily in real-world science (albeit extended to a fictional degree), and it samples from some of the same elements that Crichton used in many of his most popular novels and films, including a team of hand-picked experts, and an amusement park that goes catastrophically awry. Jurassic Park kicked off a string of sequels on the big screen, and Crichton even wrote one sequel, 1995’s The Lost World—as well as a posthumously-published quasi-prequel called Dragon’s Teeth—in book form.
Congo
Written a decade before Jurassic Park, Congo was one of several Michael Crichton novels quickly leveraged to film after the massive success of Jurassic Park. Published in 1980, the book differs from the subsequent film in many particulars, but its basic outline of a team venturing into the African Congo to search for diamonds and a lost city guarded by ruthless gray apes is pretty much the same. By the time Crichton wrote Congo he already had several movies under his belt, and he hoped to make this one into a film, as well. In fact, he actually pitched the idea to 20th Century Fox before he ever wrote the novel, selling it as a modern-day version of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines.
Sphere
One of Crichton’s more thematically ambitious novels, Sphere begins with an expedition to study what appears to be an alien spacecraft on the bottom of the ocean. In short order, however, the team is trapped beneath the surface and in danger from both external sources and one another. A hit when it was released in 1987, Sphere was another book optioned for film on the heels of Jurassic Park, resulting in a 1998 film adaptation starring Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L. Jackson. Unlike the book, the movie received less-than-glowing reviews, and currently enjoys a 13% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The Great Train Robbery
Not all of Crichton’s novels involve such lofty scientific and near-future themes. The third novel published under Crichton’s own name, The Great Train Robbery was an early hit for him, adapted into the 1978 film (which he also wrote and directed) starring Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland. Based on a real historic incident, the novel tells the story of a massive gold heist which took place in 1855, on a moving train traveling through Victorian-era London—albeit not without many setbacks and pitfalls along the way.
Eaters of the Dead
Like The Great Train Robbery, Michael Crichton’s fourth novel published under his own name was set in the past, in this case the very distant past, as a Muslim ambassador from the Caliph of Baghdad finds himself amid a group of Vikings in a battle against relict Neanderthals. Based on the real historical figure of Amad ibn Fadlan, the novel is also a retelling of the story of Beowulf. In 1999, Eaters of the Dead was adapted to film as The 13th Warrior, directed by John McTiernan (with some uncredited work by Crichton himself) and starring Antonio Banderas.
Featured image: Mac Cervantes / Unsplash
