Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986) was an American science-fiction author, best known for his 1965 novel Dune and five sequels to it. He also wrote short stories and worked as a newspaper journalist, photographer, book reviewer, ecological consultant, and lecturer.
Dune is one of the best-selling science fiction novels of all time, and the series is a classic of the science-fiction genre. The series has been adapted numerous times, including the feature film David Lynch's Dune (1984), the miniseries Frank Herbert's Dune (2000) and Children of Dune (2003), and a motion picture trilogy currently in production, with Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024) having been released with Dune: Part Three (2026) being the last installment.
Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. was born on October 8, 1920, in Tacoma, Washington, to Franklin Patrick Herbert Sr. and Eileen (née McCarthy) Herbert. His paternal grandparents had come west in 1905 to join Burley Colony in Kitsap County, one of many utopian communes springing up in Washington State beginning in the 1890s. His upbringing included spending a lot of time on the rural Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas. He was fascinated by books, could read much of the newspaper before the age of five, had an excellent memory, and learned quickly. He had an early interest in photography, buying a Kodak box camera at age ten, a new folding camera in his early teens, and a color film camera in the mid-1930s. Due to his parents' drinking, he ran away from home with his little sister, 5-year-old Patricia Lou, in 1938 to live with Frank's favorite maternal aunt, Peggy "Violet" Rowntree, and her husband, Ken Rowntree Sr. Within weeks, Patricia moved back home. But Frank, 18, remained with his aunt and uncle.
He enrolled in high school at Salem High School (now North Salem High School), where he graduated the next year. In 1939, his parents and sister had moved to Los Angeles, California, so Frank followed them. He lied about his age to get his first newspaper job at the Glendale Star. Herbert then returned to Salem in 1940 where he worked for the Oregon Statesman newspaper (now Statesman Journal) in a variety of positions, including photographer.
Herbert married Flora Lillian Parkinson in San Pedro, California, in 1941. They had one daughter, Penelope (b. February 16, 1942), and divorced in 1943. During 1942, after the U.S. entry into World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy's Seabees for six months as a photographer, but suffered a head injury and was given a medical discharge. Herbert subsequently moved to Portland, Oregon where he reported for The Oregon Journal.
After the war, Herbert attended the University of Washington, where he met Beverly Ann Stuart at a creative writing class in 1946. They were the only students who had sold any work for publication; Herbert had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, the first to Esquire in 1945 titled "Survival of the Cunning", and Stuart had sold a story to Modern Romance magazine. They married in Seattle in 1946, and had two sons, Brian (b. 1947) and Bruce Calvin Herbert who died from AIDS-related pneumonia (1951–1993). In 1949 Herbert and his wife moved to California to work on the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. Here they befriended the psychologists Ralph and Irene Slattery. The Slatterys introduced Herbert to the work of several thinkers who would influence his writing, including Freud, Jung, Jaspers, and Heidegger; they also familiarized Herbert with Zen Buddhism.
Herbert never graduated from college. According to his son Brian, he wanted to study only what interested him and so did not complete the required curriculum. He returned to journalism and worked at the Seattle Star and the Oregon Statesman. He was a writer and editor for the San Francisco Examiner's California Living magazine for a decade.
In a 1973 interview, Herbert stated that he had been reading science fiction for "about ten years" before he began writing in the genre, and he listed his favorite authors as H. G. Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, Poul Anderson and Jack Vance.
Herbert's first science fiction story, "Looking for Something", was published in the April 1952 issue of Startling Stories, then a monthly edited by Samuel Mines. Three more of his stories appeared in 1954 issues of Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories. His career as a novelist began in 1955 with the serial publication of Under Pressure in Astounding from November 1955; afterward it was issued as a book by Doubleday titled The Dragon in the Sea. The story explored sanity and madness in the environment of a 21st-century submarine and predicted worldwide conflicts over oil consumption and production. It was a critical success but not a major commercial one. During this time Herbert also worked as a speechwriter for Republican senator Guy Cordon.
Herbert began researching Dune in 1959. He was able to devote himself wholeheartedly to his writing career because his wife returned to work full-time as an advertising writer for department stores, becoming their breadwinner during the 1960s. The novel Dune was published in 1965, which spearheaded the Dune franchise. He later told Willis E. McNelly that the novel originated when he was assigned to write a magazine article about sand dunes in the Oregon Dunes near Florence, Oregon. He got overinvolved and ended up with far more raw material than needed for an article; while the article was never written, it planted in Herbert the seed that would become Dune.
Dune took six years of research and writing to complete, and was much longer than other commercial science fiction of the time. Herbert's environmental work in Oregon formed the basis of the speculative ecological work of the Fremen, which parallels real-world efforts and tactics of sand dune management.
Analog (formerly Astounding, but still edited by John W. Campbell) published it in two parts comprising eight installments, "Dune World" from December 1963 and "Prophet of Dune" in 1965. It was then rejected by nearly twenty book publishers. One editor prophetically wrote, "I might be making the mistake of the decade, but..."
Sterling E. Lanier, an editor of Chilton Book Company (known mainly for its auto-repair manuals), had read the Dune serials and offered a $7,500 advance plus future royalties for the rights to publish them as a hardcover book. Herbert rewrote much of his text.
Dune was soon a critical success. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965 and shared the Hugo Award in 1966 with ...And Call Me Conrad by Roger Zelazny.
Dune was not an immediate bestseller, but Herbert had still received $20,000 from Dune's publication by 1968, which was much more than most science fiction novels of the era. Although he could not yet take up a full-time career as a writer, Dune's success opened other doors for him. He was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's education writer from 1969 to 1972 and lecturer in general studies and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Washington (1970–1972). He then worked in Vietnam and Pakistan as a social and ecological consultant in 1972, and in 1973 he was director-photographer of the television show The Tillers.
I don't worry about inspiration or anything like that.... later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write."
By the end of 1972, Herbert had retired from newspaper writing and became a full-time fiction writer. During the 1970s and 1980s, he enjoyed considerable commercial success as an author. He divided his time between homes in Hawaii and Washington's Olympic Peninsula; his home in Port Townsend on the peninsula was intended to be an "ecological demonstration project". During this time he wrote numerous books and pushed ecological and philosophical ideas. He continued his Dune saga with Dune Messiah (1969), Children of Dune (1976), God Emperor of Dune (1981), Heretics of Dune (1984) and Chapterhouse: Dune (1985). Herbert planned to write a seventh novel to conclude the series, but his death in 1986 left storylines unresolved.