Beloved American Author Passes Away
Popular and beloved author Nelson DeMille has passed away at the age of 81. DeMille’s children, daughter Lauren DeMille of Sleepy Hollow, along with his son Alex DeMille of Brooklyn, officially confirmed the writer’s death on Tuesday.
“Nelson fought a valiant nine-month battle with esophageal cancer,” his family said in a statement to The New York Post revealed. “True to form, he faced this ordeal with courage, grace, and good humor. We are grieving, but also celebrating his wonderful life and his lasting legacy as a father, friend, and storyteller.”
DeMille, who was born in Long Island, is most well known for conjuring up tales of suspense and action, with some of his most notable works being “Plum Island,” “The Charm School,” and “The General’s Daughter,” which was turned into a feature film in 1999 starring legendary actor John Travolta.
DeMille himself revealed his own thoughts on the film in a March 2000 interview with January Magazine, “It wasn’t a bad movie. Travolta did a good job. I liked most of it. They overdeveloped some stuff and forgot other stuff and put things in that weren’t in the book that didn’t need to be put in… But I mean, as a whole, the movie was powerful. It got terrible reviews from the critics, though.”
The author’s website says he was born on Aug. 23, 1943, in New York City. His family later moved to Long Island. After high school, he attended Hofstra University. Before he became an author, DeMille served in the Army and earned a Bronze Star while deployed in Vietnam. Over the course of his writing career, DeMille wrote a total of 23 novels, with 17 of them landing on the bestseller list. Interestingly, he wrote his works by hand, using pencils and legal pads. His first published work was “By the Rivers of Babylon,” which hit store shelves in 1978.
A lot of his novels focused on his character John Corey, a former NYPD police officer who ends up working for the fictional Anti-Terrorist Task Force. DeMille referred to the character as “politically incorrect.”
“If you’re a federal government worker you watch your Ps and Qs. You watch what you say to women, about women. You watch what you say in terms of ethnic slurs. But John Corey doesn’t care about any of that, he just lets it rip and everybody is aghast at him,” the author said of his creation. He then said, “And it was kind of fun. It was fun for me and if it was fun for me I knew it was going to be fun for the reader.”
During an interview in 2022, DeMille revealed that his publisher wanted him to change the character and make Corey less controversial.
“There was some pushback on the John Corey character,” he explained. “They wanted me to make changes, which I would not make except for a few.”