Tom Clancy

Clancy was born on April 12, 1947, at Franklin Square Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in the Northwood neighborhood in northeast Baltimore. The family was Irish-American. He was the second of three children to Thomas Leo Clancy (1918–1995), who worked for the United States Postal Service, and Catherine Mary Clancy (née Langan; 1918–2001), who worked in a store's credit department. He was a member of Troop 624 of the Boy Scouts of America. Clancy's siblings are Patrick and Margaret. Clancy's mother worked to send him to Loyola High School in Towson, Maryland, a private Catholic secondary school taught by the Jesuit religious order (Society of Jesus). He graduated from Loyola High School in 1965. In 1973, Clancy joined the O. F. Bowen Agency, a small insurance agency based in Owings, Maryland, founded by his wife's grandfather. While working at the insurance agency, he wrote his debut novel, The Hunt for Red October (1984). == Career ==

Clancy's literary career began in 1982 when he started writing The Hunt for Red October, which in 1984 he sold for publishing to the Naval Institute Press for $5,000. Clancy's novels focus on the hero, most notably Jack Ryan and John Clark, both Irish Catholics like himself. He repeatedly uses the formula whereby the heroes are "highly skilled, disciplined, honest, thoroughly professional, and only lose their cool when incompetent politicians or bureaucrats get in their way. Their unambiguous triumphs over evil provide symbolic relief from the legacy of the Vietnam War." The Cold War epic Red Storm Rising (1986) was co-written (according to Clancy in the book's foreword) with fellow military-oriented author Larry Bond. The book was published by Putnam and sold almost a million copies within its first year. Clancy became the cornerstone of a publishing list by Putnam, which emphasized authors like Clancy who would produce annually. His publisher, Phyllis E. Grann, called these "repeaters." By 1988, Clancy had earned $1.3 million for The Hunt for Red October and had signed a $3 million contract for his next three books. In 1992, he sold North American rights to Without Remorse for $14 million, a record for a single book. By 1997, Penguin Putnam Inc. (part of Pearson Education) paid Clancy $50 million for world rights to two new books and another $25 million to Red Storm Entertainment for a four-year book/multimedia deal. Clancy followed this up with an agreement with Penguin's Berkley Books for 24 paperbacks to tie in with the ABC television miniseries ''Tom Clancy's Net Force'', which aired in the fall/winter of 1998. The Op-Center universe has laid the ground for the series of books written by Jeff Rovin, which was in an agreement worth $22 million, bringing the total value of the package to $97 million. In 1998, he tentatively reached an agreement to purchase the Minnesota Vikings, but had to abandon the deal because of a divorce settlement cost. The first NetForce novel, titled Net Force (1999), was adapted as a 1999 TV movie starring Scott Bakula and Joanna Going. The first Op-Center novel (''Tom Clancy's Op-Center'' published in 1995) was released to coincide with a 1995 NBC television miniseries of the same name starring Harry Hamlin and a cast of stars. Though the miniseries did not continue, the book series did, but later had little in common with the first TV miniseries other than the title and the names of the main characters. Clancy wrote several nonfiction books about various branches of the U.S. Armed Forces (see nonfiction listing, in the bibliography article). He also branded several lines of books and video games with his name that are written by other authors, following premises or storylines generally in keeping with Clancy's works. In 2008, the French video game manufacturer Ubisoft purchased the use of Clancy's name for an undisclosed sum. It has been used in conjunction with video games and related products such as movies and books. Based on his interest in private spaceflight and his investment in the launch vehicle company Rotary Rocket, Clancy was interviewed in 2007 for the documentary film Orphans of Apollo (2008). == Political views ==

Clancy was a conservative and Republican, and dedicated several of his books to American conservative political figures, including Ronald Reagan. Clancy supported the National Rifle Association and opposed abortion. Clancy praised President George W. Bush as a "good guy"; however, he opposed the Iraq War and argued it lacked a casus belli. Clancy once clashed with Richard Perle, with Clancy stating he almost "came to blows" with Perle, after Perle criticized Colin Powell for being too concerned with the lives of American troops. Ahead of the 2004 U.S. presidential election, Clancy said that voting for Democrat John Kerry would be "a stretch for me", while also declining to endorse Bush. During the interview, he noted that orthodox "Islam does not permit suicide." Among other observations during this interview, Clancy cited discussions he had with military experts on the lack of planning to deal with a hijacked plane being used in a suicide attack and criticized the news media's treatment of the United States Intelligence Community. Clancy appeared again on PBS's Charlie Rose, to discuss the implications of the day's events with Richard Holbrooke, New York Times journalist Judith Miller, and Senator John Edwards, among others. Clancy was interviewed on those shows because his book Debt of Honor (1994) included a scenario wherein a disgruntled Japanese airline pilot crashes a fueled Boeing 747 into the U.S. Capitol dome during an address by the President to a joint session of Congress, killing the President and most of Congress. In the book, Clancy also implies that Japan's prosperity is due primarily to unequal trading terms. In the book's sequel Executive Orders (1996), the president announces a new foreign policy doctrine, under which the United States will hold personally accountable any foreign leader who orders attacks on U.S. citizens, territory, or possessions in the future. A week after the September 11 attacks, Clancy suggested on ''The O'Reilly Factor'' that American left-wing politicians were partly responsible for the failure to prevent the attacks due to their "gutting" of the Central Intelligence Agency. == Personal life ==

Clancy's first wife, Wanda Thomas King, was a nurse. They married in 1969 and had four children. Wanda Clancy filed for divorce in November 1997, which became final in January 1999. As part of the divorce, she and Clancy split his minority stake in the Baltimore Orioles. On June 26, 1999, Clancy married freelance journalist Alexandra Marie Llewellyn, whom he had met in 1997. Llewellyn is the daughter of J. Bruce Llewellyn and a family friend of Colin Powell, who originally introduced the couple to each other. They had one daughter. Clancy was a Roman Catholic. The plot of his novel Red Rabbit revolves around John Paul II. In a June 27, 1993, interview with The Washington Post, he was quoted as saying, "I've had [sex scenes] in my books before, but you had to look real fast because, you know, I'm a married Catholic and I don't do that." In a 2002 interview with Lev Grossman for Time magazine, Clancy lamented what he perceived as society's double standard in the way Catholics are viewed by some people in society in relation to other demographic segments: "You can't hate black people any more, of course, and you can't hate homosexuals any more, but you can hate all the Catholics you want." The stone mansion, which cost $2 million, has 24 rooms and features a shooting range in the basement. Clancy also purchased a 17,000-square-foot penthouse condominium in the Ritz-Carlton, in Baltimore's Inner Harbor, for $16 million. His Chesapeake Bay estate sold for $4.9 million in 2020. == Death ==

Clancy died of heart failure on October 1, 2013, The Chicago Tribune quoted Pulitzer Prize–winning film critic and author Stephen Hunter as saying, "When he published The Hunt for Red October, he redefined and expanded the genre, and as a consequence of that, many people were able to publish such books who had previously been unable to do so." On March 31, 2014, the Orioles honored Clancy with a video tribute during their home opener, and the team wore a tribute patch on their jerseys through the season. == Achievements and awards ==

• Clancy was one of only three authors to sell two million copies on a first printing in the 1990s (the others were John Grisham and J. K. Rowling). Clancy's novel Clear and Present Danger (1989) sold 1,625,544 hardcover copies, making it the #1 bestselling novel of the 1980s. • Clancy received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1988. Clancy was the Host of the 1995 Achievement Summit in Colonial Williamsburg and the 1997 Achievement Summit in Baltimore. • Clancy received an honorary doctorate in humane letters and delivered the commencement address at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1992, and had since worked a reference to the school into many of his main works. • Clancy was an honorary Yeoman Warder of the Tower of London and received the title "Supernumerary Yeoman"; he had been arrested for scaling the walls in his younger years. • Clancy received the Alfred Thayer Mahan Award for Literary Achievement from the Navy League of the United States in 1990. == Works ==

Fiction • The Hunt for Red October (1984) • Red Storm Rising (1986, with Larry Bond) • Patriot Games (1987) • The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988) • Clear and Present Danger (1989) • The Sum of All Fears (1991) • Without Remorse (1993) • Debt of Honor (1994) • Executive Orders (1996) • SSN (1996, with Martin Greenberg) • Rainbow Six (1998) • The Bear and the Dragon (2000) • Red Rabbit (2002) • The Teeth of the Tiger (2003) • Dead or Alive (2010, with Grant Blackwood) • Against All Enemies (2011, with Peter Telep) • Locked On (2011, with Mark Greaney) • Threat Vector (2012, with Mark Greaney) • Command Authority (2013, with Mark Greaney) Non-fiction • Submarine: A Guided Tour Inside a Nuclear Warship (1993) • Armored Cav: A Guided Tour of an Armored Cavalry Regiment (1994) • Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing (1995) • Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit (1996) • Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force (1997) • Into the Storm – On the Ground in Iraq (with Fred Franks) (1997) • Carrier: A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier (1999) • Every Man a Tiger — the Gulf War Air Campaign (with Chuck Horner) (1999) • Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces (2001) • Shadow Warriors — Inside the Special Forces (with Carl Stiner) (2002) • Battle Ready (with Anthony Zinni) (2004) == Film, TV and video game adaptations ==

Films Short films • Ghost Recon: Alpha (2012) • The Division: Agent Origins (2016) • Ghost Recon Wildlands: War Within the Cartel (2017) Television series Video games Officially licensed games based on The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising were released in the late 1980s and early 1990s for various 8-bit home computers such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. Those included a submarine combat simulation (based on the book) and an action game (based on the film). More recently, Ubisoft has made many video game series based on Tom Clancy's books, or which were endorsed by Clancy and use his name in the series' titles. == References ==