Frank Herbert’s Dune and the Dune Series

Frank Herbert was born on 8 October 1920 in Tacoma, Washington, to Frank Patrick Herbert Sr. and Eileen (McCarthy) Herbert. In 1938 he graduated from high school and moved to Southern California, where he lied about his age to work for the Glendale Star, the first of many newspaper jobs. He married Flora Parkinson in 1940 and they had one daughter, Penny, but they divorced in 1945. He enlisted in the United States Navy in 1941, joining the Seabees, but was given a medical discharge six months later. In 1946 he entered the University of Washington. He met Beverly Ann Stuart in a creative writing class, and they married in June that year. They had two sons, Brian Patrick (1947) and Bruce Calvin (1951). Brian would himself become a writer, continuing his father’s Dune series with sequels and prequels, as well as a 2003 biography, Dreamer of Dune. Bruce would become a photographer and LGBT activist, and died of AIDS in 1993. Herbert published his first story, “Survival of the Cunning,” which was not science fiction, in Esquire in 1945; his first science fiction story, “Looking for Something,” appeared in 1952 in Startling Stories. He published his first science fiction novel in 1956: based on a story titled “Under Pressure,” the 1956 novel was titled The Dragon of the Sea, and was reprinted with the title 21st-Century Sub. Many of the themes from this work would appear in the later Dune novels. During these years, Herbert wrote for various newspapers, but took time off to work on his fiction; his wife Beverly worked as an advertising copywriter. A newspaper assignment to cover the USDA’s effort to reclaim dune lands inspired much background research—over 200 books, according to Brian Herbert’s biography—and resulted in the novel Dune, which was initially published in editor John W. Campbell’s magazine Analog in 1963 and 1964; after twenty rejections, Chilton Books, an auto-repair manual publisher, offered to publish it, which it did in 1965. Dune won the Hugo Award that year, and tied for the Nebula Award in 1966. It became an underground cult classic and ultimately the greatest-selling science fiction novel of all time. Herbert wrote the novel with his wife Beverly’s constant response and comments, and he modeled the Lady Jessica on her. Herbert wrote five sequels, generally regarded as being of lesser quality than Dune itself. However, much of the scholarship analyzes the original novel in the “universe” established within the series of sequels, so Dune appears in relation to the novels from Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and God Emperor of Dune in particular.