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RICHARD PRESTON is the author of seven books, including The Hot Zone, The Cobra Event and The Demon in the Freezer, which are his “Dark Biology” series. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. His books have been translated into more than 30 languagues, and he’s won numerous awards, including the American Institute of Physics Award and the National Magazine Award. He’s also the only person who isn't a medical doctor ever to receive the Centers for Disease Control's Champion of Prevention Award for public health. An asteroid is named "Preston" after him. (Asteroid Preston is a ball of rock three miles across. It may slam into Mars or the Earth some day, creating an explosion similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.) He's the brother of bestselling author Douglas Preston. Richard Preston lives outside New York City with his wife, Michelle, and their three children. Currently, he's working on Panic in Level 4, a collection of some of his classic New Yorker articles (greatly expanded and updated, with an introductory essay describing how he inadvertently blew open his space suit while inside an Army Level 4 Ebola lab).
RICHARD PRESTON TELLS HIS STORY ... How I write When I’m researching a book, I conduct large numbers of interviews with the people I'm writing about. I also try to experience their world from within. I take notes by hand in a reporter's notebook, using a mechanical pencil. These days, when I'm climbing redwoods, I keep the pencil tied to myself (a mechanical pencil falling 35 stories becomes a deadly missile.) In researching a book, I've ended up with as many as 60 notebooks full of scrawled notes. I write many drafts. A book seems to reveal itself slowly. The characters come alive on their own, and they end up showing me where the story must go. "Nameless" and "Vertical Eden," the first two chapters of The Wild Trees, went through at least 20 drafts. I'm passionately interested in the relationship between the human species and nature. I like to reveal nature by showing human character engaged with nature, often in a life-or-death situation, such as Nancy Jaax's first meeting with Ebola virus (in The Hot Zone), or Steve Sillett's first climb of a redwood, (in the opening of The Wild Trees). What makes these scenes powerful is that the people are verifiably real and the universe is the actual one we live in, not the universe of a novelist's imagination. Thus the scenes have a versimilitude that can exceed that of the novel, and can take us into the heart of human experience. I do a lot of fact-checking. I read passages aloud to my subjects on the telephone while asking them to correct facts and tiny details. Fact-checking is like sharpening the focus of a lens, revealing new detail. It is especially important with scientists, who expect and need accuracy from journalists. I rewrite passages based on what my subjects tell me. In this way, I try to maintain respect for nature, for narrative, and for the integrity of human achievement. A "Normal" Childhood - Books and the Sandbox I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 5, 1954, and grew up in Wellesley, a suburb of Boston. As a child, I was shy. I was small for my age, with blue eyes, brown hair, and freckles. I had difficulty learning how to read. Even today, I can remember the struggle of putting simple letters together to make words. In fourth grade, when I was nine, I discovered books. Books became a permanent part of my life. I began reading everything I could get my hands on; I would like to believe that books can transform a person and possibly the world, if only in modest ways. I'm the oldest of three brothers (no sisters). We're very close. My brother Douglas Preston and I used to get into frequent fistfights in childhood, and I once knocked out two of his front teeth. (They were baby teeth, so they grew back.) I dedicated The Wild Trees to Doug. Our other brother, David, is an accomplished medical doctor who practices in Waterville, Maine. I dedicated The Cobra Event to him. Until we were about sixteen, all three of us Preston brothers enjoyed playing in a sandbox in our back yard. By "playing" I mean we would set things on fire, have wars with plastic soldiers and model airplanes, and detonate cherry bombs. Typically the police would arrive while we ran off into nearby golf course and our mother played dumb with the cops. One day, a neighborhood kid burned off a lot of his clothing (fortunately none of his skin) playing with us. He ran home screaming, half-naked. His mother asked him what happened, and he answered, "I was playing in the Prestons' sandbox." Our parents, Doffy and Jerry Preston, are alive and well. Luckily, theseem to enjoy recalling these curious events of our childhood. High school - Sylvia Plath and assaulting teachers I attended Wellesley High School, where I had mediocre grades and a bad disciplinary record, including an assault on a teacher. (I didn't hurt the man, but I shoved him, and that's morally and legally an assault.) However, I had some wonderful teachers, including Wilbury A. Crockett, Ph.D. , who taught English at Wellesley High. Dr. Crockett also taught English to Sylvia Plath when she was a student at Wellesley High, and he is said to have inspired Plath to become a poet. Later, when Plath had a nervous breakdown and ended up in a mental hospital, and stopped speaking, Dr. Crockett visited her regularly and played Scrabble with her. At first, Plath refused to make the letters form words, but gradually she began communicating with Dr. Crockett. Thus Sylvia Plath regained her use of language by playing Scrabble with her high school English teacher. Other fantastic high school teachers of mine were Jeanie and Brooks Goddard and Gerry Murphy. Unfortunately, however, I was rejected by every college I applied to. Getting into College One of the colleges that didn’t want me was Pomona College, in southern California. I really wanted to go there, so I called the Pomona dean of admissions—collect—and said, "Do you, like, ever change your mind?" No, the dean informed me, and it was a policy. I started calling the dean once a week, collect. The operator would say: “Richard Preston is calling, will you accept the charges?” I’d say, “Hi, dean, I was just checking to see if your policy has changed.” He kept accepting my calls, anyway. Finally I was admitted to Pomona College in the middle of the year. (I don't recommend this as a way of getting into Pomona College.) I graduated from Pomona College summa cum laude. A year later, my brother Doug also graduated from Pomona near the top of his class. (We both majored in English and became the best of friends in college.) One of our professors and friends at Pomona was Darcy O'Brien, who later became an award-winning novelist and nonfiction writer, and who encouraged both of us to write. While I was in college, I became hungry to explore the limits of human knowledge. Today, when I write about something, I try to capture the feeling of wonder that comes from opening the doors of a mystery. Writing, as with science, is about seeing the world differently and slightly more clearly than anyone has ever seen it before. Princeton - The McPhinos From Pomona, I went to Princeton University, where I got a Ph.D. in English. I wrote my dissertation about nineteenth-century American narrative nonfiction writing—"The Fabric of Fact: Literary Journalism in Nineteeth-Century America." My dissertation advisors were Americanists Emory B. Elliott and William L. Howarth. They became mentors and friends of mine. Will Howarth had edited The John McPhee Reader. He suggested I sign up for a well-known undergraduate writing course called "The Literature of Fact," taught by the author John McPhee. A distinguished New Yorker writer, John McPhee has published some twenty-nine books, all but one of them nonfiction. I took McPhee's course as a graduate student. About two thirds of McPhee's students have gone on to become professional writers or editors. This seems to be an unsurpassed record in the undergraduate teaching of writing. We call ourselves McPhinos, by analogy with the neutrino, a subatomic particle that is emitted during a nuclear chain reaction. In John McPhee’s course, I became fascinated with the idea that nonfiction writing can be stylish and powerful literature. I also learned a lot about the ways and means of journalism. I decided to try to become a nonfiction writer rather than a scholar. Another thing happened: I met my wife, Michelle Parham Preston, in the Princeton English Department; we were fellow grad students (she is also a McPhino). We fell in love, got married, had three children, are still in love and happily married today. Read Michelle Preston's recent piece in The New Yorker about her great-grandfather, the photographer Eugene de Salignac. Writing Career After getting my Ph.D., in 1983, I got an advance from a publisher for my first book, First Light, which is a nonfiction book about astronomy. It was published in 1987 and was excerpted in The New Yorker. It won the American Institute of Physics Award. It is still in print and is considered to be a sort of cult classic about science. I then wrote a nonfiction book about the building of a steel mill, American Steel. This book also won awards and ran in The New Yorker. Around 1992, I became interested in Ebola virus and emerging infectious diseases. The result was a New Yorker article, " Crisis in the Hot Zone,” which later become my book, The Hot Zone. It ended up a #1 bestseller. It also inspired the movie "Outbreak," starrting Dustin Hoffman and Renee Russo. Then I wrote a novel, The Cobra Event, which describes a fictional bioterror event in New York City. The novel is based on years of research. A copy of The Cobra Event ended up in President Bill Clinton’s hands, and it supposedly kept him awake for two nights—the first night reading it, the second night scared s******* thinking about it. According to The New York Times, Clinton discussed the book at a White House National Security Council meeting, where he asked "where Richard Preston got his information" and how credible the fictional plot was (a bioterror attack on NYC with genetically-engineered bioweapon). The Clinton White House subsequently authorized billions of dollars in funding to beef up preparedness for bioterrorism, should it ever occur. When the 2001 anthrax bioterror event happened, bioterrorism suddenly became real, not just a matter of fiction. The Cobra Event is now seen as entertaining, prescient, and scary. When the anthrax terror event occurred, I decided to write a nonfiction book about bioterrorism and smallpox virus (which is thought to be the most dangerous bioweapon on the planet; more threatening than Ebola, because it’s far more contagious and because it's thought to be in the hands of bioweaponeers.) The Demon in the Freezer was published in 2002. My three books about viruses (The Hot Zone, The Cobra Event, and The Demon in the Freezer) are a trio titled “Dark Biology.” In 2003, I published The Boat of Dreams: A Christmas Story. It's a children's story, set in Maine, about two kids who meet a very odd Santa Claus in a flying lobster boat. This book was written for a high school friend of mine who was battling breast cancer, and I wanted to tell her a story about friendship and hope. Then I started climbing giant redwoods in California. The result was The Wild Trees. Good luck! Richard Preston
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