Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986) was an American science-fiction author, best known for his 1965 novel Dune and its five sequels.

He also wrote short stories and worked as a newspaper journalist, photographer, book reviewer, ecological consultant, and lecturer.

[9] 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.

[12] 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.[13] Within weeks, Patricia moved back home.

[1] 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.

[15] After the war, Herbert attended the University of Washington, where he met Beverly Ann Stuart at a creative writing class in 1946.

In a 1973 interview, Herbert stated that he had been reading science fiction "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.

[20] 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.

[20] The story explored sanity and madness in the environment of a 21st-century submarine and predicted worldwide conflicts over oil consumption and production.

[23] 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.

[12] Dune took six years of research and writing to complete and was much longer than other commercial science fiction of the time.

[30] One editor prophetically wrote, "I might be making the mistake of the decade, but..."[31] 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 planned to write a seventh novel to conclude the series, but his death in 1986 left storylines unresolved.

[43] In October 1978, Herbert was the featured speaker at the Octocon II science fiction convention held at the El Rancho Tropicana in Santa Rosa, California.

During this same year of his wife's death, his career took off with the release of David Lynch's film version of Dune.

Despite high expectations, a big-budget production design and an A-list cast, the movie drew mostly poor reviews in the United States.

He died of a massive pulmonary embolism while recovering from surgery for pancreatic cancer on February 11, 1986, in Madison, Wisconsin, aged 65.

[52] Herbert was politically active within the Republican party, and worked as a speechwriter for several politicians, including Senator Guy Cordon.

Herbert also volunteered on the campaign of Republican William Bantz in the 1958 Washington Senate election, who unsuccessfully challenged the incumbent Democrat Henry M.

However, he was appalled to learn of McCarthy's blacklisting of suspected communists from working in certain careers and believed that he was endangering essential freedoms of citizens of the United States.

"[58] He praised President Ronald Reagan, for his pro-family and pro-individualist stances, while opposing his foreign policy.

[49] In Chapterhouse: Dune, he wrote: All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.

Frank Herbert believed civil service to be "one of the most serious errors we made as a democracy" and that bureaucracy negatively impacts the lives of people in all forms of government.

He stated that "every such bureaucracy eventually becomes an aristocracy" and uses preferential treatment and nepotism in favor of bureaucrats as his main arguments.

[59] Frank Herbert used his science fiction novels to explore complex[60] ideas involving philosophy, religion, psychology, politics and ecology.

Neither his sequels to Dune nor any of his other books won a Hugo or Nebula Award, although almost all of them were New York Times Best Sellers.

[73] Malcolm Edwards wrote, in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction:[74] Much of Herbert's work makes difficult reading.

His ideas were genuinely developed concepts, not merely decorative notions, but they were sometimes embodied in excessively complicated plots and articulated in prose which did not always match the level of thinking [...] His best novels, however, were the work of a speculative intellect with few rivals in modern science fiction.The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted Herbert in 2006.

[78] Beginning in 2012, Herbert's estate and WordFire Press have released four previously unpublished novels in e-book and paperback formats: High-Opp (2012),[79] Angels' Fall (2013),[80] A Game of Authors (2013),[81] and A Thorn in the Bush (2014).

Anderson said that Frank Herbert's notes included a description of the story and a great deal of character background information.