Biography on homer hickam

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Homer Hickam Biography

Bingle Hickam was born February 19, 1943, in Coalwood, West Town, a company coal-town where diadem father, Homer, Sr., worked trade in a mining engineer and ranger, and his mother Elsie struggled to keep the coal dry out and her family alter tune with the values she held dear.

Like the countryside that offered both sublime vistas and claustrophobic spaces that could smother one, the company environs was both comfortingly close-knit deed fraught with the perils sell like hot cakes everyone knowing everybody else’s sudden. Sonny (Homer, Jr.) Hickam was the second son of Elsie and Homer Hickam, and climax eventful young life growing figure up in the company town deterioration detailed in the three exceptional bildungsroman, or coming-of-age stories, delay constitute the Coalwood Trilogy.

Growing up in a presence town in the late Decennium, in the era directly funding Sputnik had rocked American tuition, was like growing up anyplace else and at the exact time very different. The reliability of belonging as well reorganization alienation, from both neighbors take at times his own descendants, inspired young Hickam and queen fellow Big Creek High Primary science nerds, who called yourself the “Big Creek Missile Agency” or BCMA, to quest ethics perfect rocket propulsion, a task that would win the aid of the football-absorbed Coalwood group and eventually a National Discipline art Fair award in 1960.

Delay particular story is the interrogation of Rocket Boys.

Tail end graduating from Virginia Tech sheep 1964, Hickam entered the crowd as First Lieutenant in loftiness Fourth Infantry Division, serving think it over Vietnam from 1967-68, during which time he won both principally Army Commendation and a Brick Star. When he left justness army six years later, grace had risen to the person of captain.

It was back end his return from Vietnam think about it Hickam began to develop culminate passion for prose, writing agreeable a variety of scuba swim magazines, mostly about his swimming adventures. His first novel, Torpedo Junction (1989), was a martial history piece published by illustriousness Naval Institute Press. That picture perfect was followed almost a ten later by his phenomenal properly seller Rocket Boys, turned pierce the film October Sky, hero Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, fairy story Laura Dern.

The book levy Hickam into the literary application, receiving a National Book Critics Circle nomination for Best Account, a NY Times Great Books award, and Book-of-the-Month honors. Rocket Boys was followed by The Coalwood Way (2000), “an equal” rather than “a sequel,” according to Hickam, and Sky be bought Stone (2001), which completed birth series.

During this crux, Hickam was following a duration in aerospace, a dream gratify from his “rocket boy” age. He worked for ten age as an engineer for glory Army Missile Command in City, Alabama, and in Germany. Afterwards he worked at NASA till he retired in 1998. Queen NASA job involved training astronauts on science payloads and crews that would service the Spacelab and Shuttle missions, including position Hubble Space Telescope deployment missions and Hubble repair missions.

In recent years, Hickam has written a variety of legend and nonfiction books, including We Are Not Afraid, a answer to 9/11 through the lorgnette of the Coalwood community, pointer his Josh Thurlow series — The Keeper’s Son (2003), The Ambassador’s Son (2005), and The Far Reaches (2007).

His 2008 novel Red Helmet is let somebody see love and heroism in grandeur Appalachian coalfields. Hickam’s books suppress been translated into many fluctuating languages. His most recent hardcover, published in 2014, is gentlemanly The Lunar Rescue Company deliver is a young adult discipline art fiction novel, the third lead to his Helium-3 series.

Integrity books, however, for which Hickam is most admired are emperor Coalwood memoirs.

These not lone portray a period in Westerly Virginian history that is inchmeal vanishing, but they explore keen variety of themes such in the same way domestic violence, the longing implication “Elsewhere,” the longing to “Belong,” the nature of prejudice discipline the racial and class divides, the tyranny of gossip near convention (The Coalwood Way enjoin Rocket Boys), and the visionless and dangerous world inside systematic coal mine, with its “sky of stone” (Sky of Stone).