Author Michael Crichton (born on this date in 1942) -- he died in 2008 of cancer

from Writer's Almanac (Garrison Keillor, Minnesota Public Radio):

It's the birthday of best-selling novelist Michael Crichton, born in Chicago in 1942. He liked to write, and when he was 13, he was on a family vacation to Sunset Crater National Monument in Arizona. He loved it, and he told his parents he was surprised that there weren't more visitors, and they encouraged him to write about it. His mom said he should send an article to The New York Times, and his dad told him to go interview the ranger. So his family waited outside while Michael went in to do his interview. He recalled later: "Back in the car, driving to the next place, my father said, 'How many visitors do they have every year?' 'I didn't ask that,' I said. 'Is it open all year round?' 'I didn't ask that, either.' 'What was the ranger's name?' 'I didn't ask.' 'Jesus,' my father said. 'What published information did you get?' I showed him the pamphlets and brochures. 'Well, that'll be enough. You can write the story from that.'" And sure enough, The New York Times published his piece, and he was paid $60.
Crichton went to Harvard to be an English major, but one of his professors didn't like Crichton's writing style and kept giving him C's. So for an assignment on Gulliver's Travels, he turned in an essay written not by him but by George Orwell, and the professor gave him a B- on that. He figured that if Orwell only got a B- at Harvard, the English department was too difficult for him, so he went ahead and switched his major from English to anthropology, and he graduated summa cum laude.
He went on to medical school, but tuition was so expensive that he decided to keep writing to make some extra money, and he tried his hand at novels. He wrote his first several thrillers under pseudonyms. The Andromeda Strain (1969), published under his own name, was a best-seller; the book came out the same year that he graduated from medical school, and though he did a year's fellowship at the Jonas Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, he decided to scrap medicine for a writing career.
He went on to write a series of thrillers, many of them exploring the unintended consequences of science or technology gone too far. His books include Jurassic Park (1990), Rising Sun (1992), and State of Fear (2004). Michael Crichton managed to be a huge success not only in the literary world, but also in film and television. He was a Hollywood director, and he wrote the screenplay for some of the film adaptations of his books, including Jurassic Park. He also created the hit TV series ER. In 1994, he had a film, a television series, and a novel all sitting atop their respective charts at the same time. In 2002, a newly discovered species of dinosaur was named after him: Crichtonsaurus bohlini. He died of cancer in 2008, leaving behind one complete manuscript and about one-third of a second. The complete manuscript, Pirate Latitudes, was published the following year. HarperCollins and Crichton's estate tapped Richard Preston (The Hot Zone [1994]) to complete the unfinished work; Micro, a thriller about graduate students working for a mysterious biotech company in Hawaii, will be released this November.