Tom Clancy

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Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. (April 12, 1947 – October 1, 2013) was an American novelist best known for his technologically detailed espionage and military-science novellines set during and after the Cold War (1945-1991).

Seventeen of his books were bestsellers, and more than 100,000 copies of his books were sold.

His name was also used on film scripts written by ghostwriters, nonfiction books on military affairs, and video games.

He was a part-owner of his home town Major League Baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles of the American League, and vice chairman of their community involvements and public affairs committees. Clancy's literary career began in 1984 when he sold his first thin military thriller book The Hunt for Red October, which was released by Annapolis' tiny academic Naval Institute Press for $5,000. His films The Hunt for Red October (1984), Patriot Games (1987), Clear and Present Danger (1989), and The Sum of All Fears (1991) have all been turned into commercially successful films.

Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, Chris Pine, and John Krasinski have all appeared in Clancy's most popular fictional character, Jack Ryan.

Willem Dafoe and Liev Schreiber have both played John Clark, a well-known character of his.

Tom Clancy's art also inspired games such as the Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, and Splinter Cell series.

Clancy died on October 1, 2013.

His Jack Ryan collection has been published by his family's estate through a line of authors since his father's death.

Early life and education

Clancy was born on April 12, 1947, at Franklin Square Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in northeast Baltimore's Northwood neighborhood. The family was Irish-American. Thomas Clancy, a director of the United States Postal Service, and Catherine Clancy, who worked in a store's credit department, were the second of three children to visit him. He was a member of Troop 624 of the Boy Scouts of America.

Clancy's mother arranged for him to attend Loyola High School in Towson, Maryland, where he graduated in 1965. He enrolled in Loyola College (now Loyola University Maryland) in Baltimore in 1969, earning a bachelor's degree in English literature. He served as the president of the chess club while attending Loyola College. He joined the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps, but he was ineligible to serve due to his myopia (nearsightedness), which required him to wear thick eyeglasses.

Clancy worked with an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut, after graduating.

Clancy joined the O. F. Bowen Agency, a small insurance company based in Owings, Maryland, that was established by his wife's grandfather in 1973. In 1980, he purchased the insurance company from his wife's grandmother and wrote books in his spare time. He wrote The Hunt for Red October (1984), while working at the insurance company.

Personal life

Wanda Thomas King, Clancy's first wife, was a nurse. Michelle, Christine, Sarah, and Kathleen were married in 1969 and had four children: Michelle, Christine, Sarah, and Kathleen. The couple married for a brief period of time in 1995, but they were officially separated in December 1996. Wanda Clancy filed for divorce in November 1997, but it was declared in January 1999.

Clancy married freelance journalist Alexandra Marie Llewellyn, who had first met in 1997. Llewellyn is the niece of J. Bruce Llewellyn and Colin Powell's family friend who first introduced the two people to each other. They stayed together until Clancy's death in October 2013. There was just one child at the time.

Clancy was a Roman Catholic. The story of his book Red Rabbit revolves around John Paul II. "You can't hate black people any more, of course," Clancy said in a 2002 interview with Lev Grossman of Time magazine, "you can't hate black people any more."

The 80-acre estate, which was once a summer camp, is located in Calvert County, Maryland. It has a panoramic view of the Chesapeake Bay. The stone mansion, which cost $2 million, has 24 rooms and a shooting range in the basement. A World War II-era M4 Sherman tank was also on display, as a Christmas gift from his first wife.

Clancy also bought a 17,000 square foot penthouse condominium in Baltimore's Inner Harbor, for $16 million. Clancy and his wife built the apartment from four separate parts.

In 2020, his Chesapeake Bay estate went for $4.9 million.

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Career

Clancy's literary career began in 1982 when he started writing The Hunt for Red October, which in 1984 he sold for publishing to the Naval Institute Press for $5,000. The publisher was impressed with the work; Deborah Grosvenor, the Naval Institute Press editor who read through the book, said later that she convinced the publisher: "I think we have a potential best seller here, and if we don't grab this thing, somebody else would." She believed Clancy had an "innate storytelling ability, and his characters had this very witty dialogue". Clancy, who had hoped to sell 5,000 copies, ended up selling over 45,000. After publication, the book received praise from President Ronald Reagan, who called the work "the best yarn", subsequently boosting sales to 300,000 hardcover and two million paperback copies of the book, making it a national bestseller. The book was critically praised for its technical accuracy, which led to Clancy meeting several high-ranking officers in the U.S. military, as well as Steve Pieczenik, and to inspiration for reoccurring characters in his works. Clancy's novels focus on the hero, most notably Jack Ryan and John Clark, both Irish Catholics like himself. He repeatedly uses the formula whereby the heroes are "highly skilled, disciplined, honest, thoroughly professional, and only lose their cool when incompetent politicians or bureaucrats get in their way. Their unambiguous triumphs over evil provide symbolic relief from the legacy of the Vietnam War."

The Cold War epic Red Storm Rising (1986) was co-written (according to Clancy in the book's foreword) with fellow military-oriented author Larry Bond. The book was published by Putnam and sold almost a million copies within its first year. Clancy became the cornerstone of a publishing list by Putnam which emphasized authors like Clancy who would produce annually. His publisher, Phyllis E. Grann, called these "repeaters."

Clancy has author status on the cover of dozens of books. Seventeen of his novels made it to the top of the New York Times best seller list. He co-authored memoirs of top generals, and produced numerous guided tours of the elite aspects of the American military. Andrew Bacevich states:

By 1988, Clancy had earned $1.3 million for The Hunt for Red October and had signed a $3 million contract for his next three books. In 1992, he sold North American rights to Without Remorse for $14 million, a record for a single book. By 1997, Penguin Putnam Inc. (part of Pearson Education) paid Clancy $50 million for world rights to two new books and another $25 million to Red Storm Entertainment for a four-year book/multimedia deal. Clancy followed this up with an agreement with Penguin's Berkley Books for 24 paperbacks to tie in with the ABC television miniseries Tom Clancy's Net Force, which aired in the fall/winter of 1998. The Op-Center universe has laid the ground for the series of books written by Jeff Rovin, which was in an agreement worth $22 million, bringing the total value of the package to $97 million.

In 1993, Clancy joined a group of investors that included Peter Angelos, and bought the Baltimore Orioles from Eli Jacobs. In 1998, he reached an agreement to purchase the Minnesota Vikings, but had to abandon the deal because of a divorce settlement cost.

The first NetForce novel, titled Net Force (1999), was adapted as a 1999 TV movie starring Scott Bakula and Joanna Going. The first Op-Center novel (Tom Clancy's Op-Center published in 1995) was released to coincide with a 1995 NBC television miniseries of the same name starring Harry Hamlin and a cast of stars. Though the miniseries did not continue, the book series did, but later had little in common with the first TV miniseries other than the title and the names of the main characters.

Clancy wrote several nonfiction books about various branches of the U.S. Armed Forces (see nonfiction listing, in the bibliography article). He also branded several lines of books and video games with his name that are written by other authors, following premises or storylines generally in keeping with Clancy's works.

With the release of The Teeth of the Tiger (2003), Clancy introduced Jack Ryan's son and two nephews as main characters; those characters continued in his last four novels, Dead or Alive (2010), Locked On (2011), Threat Vector (2012), and Command Authority (2013).

In 2008, the French video game manufacturer Ubisoft purchased the use of Clancy's name for an undisclosed sum. It has been used in conjunction with video games and related products such as movies and books. Based on his interest in private spaceflight and his US$1 million investment in the launch vehicle company Rotary Rocket, Clancy was interviewed in 2007 for the documentary film Orphans of Apollo (2008).

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Achievements and awards

• Clancy was one of only three authors to sell two million copies on a first printing in the 1990s (the others were John Grisham and J. K. Rowling). Clancy's novel Clear and Present Danger (1989) sold 1,625,544 hardcover copies, making it the #1 bestselling novel of the 1980s.
• Clancy received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1988. Clancy was the Host of the 1995 Achievement Summit in Colonial Williamsburg and the 1997 Achievement Summit in Baltimore.
• Clancy received an honorary doctorate in humane letters and delivered the commencement address at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1992, and had since worked a reference to the school into many of his main works.
• Clancy was an honorary Yeoman Warder of the Tower of London and received the title "Supernumerary Yeoman"; he had been arrested for scaling the walls in his younger years.
• Clancy received the Alfred Thayer Mahan Award for Literary Achievement from the Navy League of the United States in 1990.