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"No regrets. Early on, it gave me something to write about, an area of expertise that I could draw upon, a fund of experience and a sense of pace. Things happen fast. I still think it's true that any sense of narrative pacing on my part comes out of the emergency room. We don't get to know anybody well, and it's time to move on." He laughs at himself; he has been criticized for characters who have the depth of dust-bowl topsoil. The discipline of medicine fit his perception of himself, but the politics -- a collegial judgment call by his superiors for what he felt was a needless series of operations, say, or, in those days, the rigid abortion restrictions -- drew him up cold. He had a tetchy stomach that gave him the tendency to faint.
So he concluded, Physician, wheel thyself. And drove away from such a future, in 1970. "To quit medicine to become a writer struck most people like quitting the Supreme Court to become a bail bondsman," he wrote. But this was disingenuous. He had already published 10 thrillers. By the time The Andromeda Strain reached the screen in 1972, he was writing screenplays and other novels, and about to start a career as a film director (Coma, The Great Train Robbery, Runaway). It was natural for him, Crichton says. He knew the works of Hitchcock before he knew the works of Dickens.
John Michael Crichton grew up in a suburb of New York City, on Long Island, one of four children of an advertising-magazine executive and a homemaker. The parents encouraged the children to find nothing intellectually daunting. The theater, movies and museums were a large part of their lives. Crichton sold his first story, a travel piece, to the New York Times when he was 14. He entered Harvard as an English major, intending to become a writer, but after , his compositions were adjudged underwhelming, he switched to anthropology. "The English department was not the place for an aspiring writer," he says. "It was the place for an aspiring English professor."
After graduating with honors in 1964, ever precocious, he lectured on anthropology for a year at Cambridge University in England. Then came medical school and the incredible events that followed. In the past 18 months, in just the U.S., Crichton has sold 30 million books. His popularity seems to spring from his ability to marry his vast appetite for science and its frontiers to humans caught in perilous situations -- all told in a driving narrative that fairly whispers, ". . . and then . . . and then . . ." Jurassic Park, for one, has sold 9 million copies.
Yet, as seems to be the way of it with many people of protean interests (his passions range from computers, about which he wrote a book, to Jasper Johns, about whom he wrote a book) and prodigious success, personal happiness does not always attend. There was a period, in the late '70s and early '80s, when Crichton was blocked. "Writing was very difficult for me." He leans toward his interlocutor conspiratorially. "You know, Olivier got stage fright when he was 65. It lasted about five years and then vanished. I did everything I could think of to do. Nothing seemed to much matter."