Michael Crichton (born 1942) is best known as a novelist of popular fiction whose stories explore the confrontation between traditional social and moral values and the demands of the new technological age. His most successful novel, Jurassic Park (1990), involves the re-creation of living dinosaurs from ancient DNA and examines what can go wrong when greedy people misconstrue the power of new and untested technologies.

Crichton was born in Chicago and raised on Long Island. At fourteen years of age, he wrote and sold articles to the New York Times travel section, and, in 1964, earned a B. A. in anthropology from Harvard University. The following year, while on a European travel fellowship in anthropology and ethnology, he met and married Joan Radam; they eventually divorced in 1970. Returning to Harvard University in 1965, Crichton entered medical school, where he began to write novels under the pseudonym John Lange in order to support...