As a child I enjoyed books and old movies and imitatively worked up my own stories both prose and in comic-book form. I was particularly fascinated by dinosaurs, too, and adopted as my first hero Roy Chapman Andrews, one-time director of the American Museum of Natural History and author of (among other things) ALL ABOUT DINOSAURS. It therefore struck me as logical that I should grow up to be a paleontologist, dig up some dinosaurs, and write books about the experience.
I broke into print, however, in the seventh grade with a poem about Hannibal (the Carthaginian general, not Samuel L. Clemens's hometown), and then, during my freshman year of high school, I discovered Mars -— the Mars of science fiction's two great romantics, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury -- and somehow understood that I, too, must grow up to be A Writer, or at least a rich and famous person. Ten years later, I was one! A Writer, I mean.
