Novelist Michael Crichton, age -14, lost round one of his battle with cancer. A rematch has yet to be scheduled.
Crichton is best known as the go-to name when boorish literary folk want to talk about a hack writer (alongside the likes of Tom Clancy and Stephen King). And they're justified in this, because - despite having never read a Crichton book - I can pretty much assume he was garbage. Jurassic Park became a fluffed-up action flick and all his other direct-to-film "novels", steeped as they were in science fiction, were transformed into C-rate flicks (Congo, Timeline, The Andromeda Stain). Being a science fiction writer definitely didn't help his standings in the world-o-pretension, as demonstrated by our chart:
~~ Shakespeare
~~ Proust
~~ Some Fancy Classical Novel
~~ Some Fancy Classical Novel You've Never Heard of
~~ Contemporary Literature
~~ Children's Literature
~~ Science Fiction
~~ Spy Fiction (outside of le Carre)
~~ Courtroom Fiction
~~ Horror Fiction
~~ Fantasy (outside of Tolkein)
~~ Romance
~~ Harry Potter
That's pretty low on the totem pole for 'ol Micky C, but at least he's mathematically ahead of people like Jude Deveraux or William F. Buckley Jr. What an accomplishment!
Still, I will throw Crichton a bone. According to his Wikipedia page, when he was an undergraduate at Harvard, Crichton felt that one of his professors was intentionally giving him low grades out of spite so he worked out an arrangement with another professor where he would hand in an essay by George Orwell pretending it was his own. The essay got a B-. That kind of chicanery, my friends, requires some balls. Bully for you, Mick. Bully for you.
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