Homer Hickam
Homer Hickam has been a writer since 1969, following his return from Vietnam. Highlights of Hickam's awards and honors include the prestigious University of Alabama’s Clarence Cason Award and the Appalachian Heritage Writer’s Award for his memoirs and fiction.
At first, he mostly wrote about his scuba diving adventures for a variety of different magazines. This led to his first book, Torpedo Junction, a military history best-seller published in 1989 by the Naval Institute Press. In 1998, Delacorte Press published Hickam’s second book, Rocket Boys: A Memoir, the story of his life in the little town of Coalwood, WV.
Rocket Boys, an instant classic, has since been translated into eight languages and released as an abridged audio book and electronic book. Among many honors, Rocket Boys was selected by the New York Times as one of its “Great Books of 1998” and nominated by the National Book Critics Circle as Best Biography of 1998. In 1999, Universal Studios released its critically-acclaimed film October Sky, based on Rocket Boys (The title October Sky is an anagram of Rocket Boys). Delacorte subsequently released a mass market paperback of Rocket Boys, re-titled October Sky, which reached #1 on the New York Times best-seller list.