Biography
Now Dan Simmons is one of the few modern authors whose creativity covers all the well-known genres, ranging from the classic novel and ending with the thriller, fantasy and science fiction. Since childhood, dreaming about writing career, the teenager reread hundreds of books, and subsequently elements of the works of Homer, Jeffrey Chosera and Bram Stoker were organically fit into his own stories and made them masterpieces of American and world literature.Childhood and youth
Dan Simmons was born on April 4, 1948 in the densexal city of Peoria, located in the central part of the American state of Illinois. Open sources contain very few information about the early biography of the future writer, which has passed in small settlements, among people who preferred a quiet cozy provincial life.
These places were later described in the novels "Winter Ghosts" and "Summer Nights". It is possible that close friends of the author, postmen, librarians or just neighbors on the street have become prototypes of heroes. And the characters of the parents of Robert and Catherine and their older children Wayne and Ted were used when creating almost all the main characters.
I barely learned to read, Dan "swallowed" all the literature ever had home, and by the 3rd class became the regular visitor to the library and took 10-15 books every week. Over time, the boy had a taste for quality works, and he began consciously approach the choice of works and search for answers to the questions that arose in the head.
Then Simmons decided on a future profession and began to work hard in order to become a writer in adulthood. In the graduation class, the young man was offered to go in the footsteps of the elder brother and master the profession of the artist, but the desire to go on their own way did not make the wrong choice and turned the scales in the direction of education in the Humanitarian University.
As a result, in the 1970s, Simmons graduated from a male college in Crowfordsville and received a bachelor's degree of English. For the contribution to the work of the Student Newspaper, the young man received an award of a university society, which helped continue their studies and become a magistrict for education and a professional teacher. Until 1989, Dan worked as a teacher and eventually developed the author's program aimed at developing writing talent in gifted, originally thinking children.
Books
Despite the fact that the work of the teacher took a lot of time, Simmons did not leave his own literature classes. He unsuccessfully tried to publish the works of the works and once came to the writing conference organized in one of the Universities of Colorado. At the seminar that followed the theoretical part, a man presented a judge, a famous fiction Harlan Ellison, a small story called "River Scheme flows back."
The work was so liked the picky owner of many prestigious premiums, that he shook his hand with a novice colleague and declared that Dan was a real writer. After that, Simmons won in the literary competition established by the publishing house "Twilight Zone", and seriously thought about their own essays to earn a living.
In 1983, after entering the story, the story "Remembering Siri", later became the story of the consul in the fantastic tetralogy of the "Hyperion songs", Dan got a good fee and realized that the dream gradually becomes reality.
Full financial independence to the American writer helped to achieve the debut novel "Song Kali", published in 1985. The book, which became a combination of love lyrics, erotic, thriller and fiction, conquered the most serious critics and received the World Fantasy Award reward for the best work of a large literary form.
The following books that saw the light in the late 1980s were the dramatic history of the "gravity phase" and the fantastic book of "Jite Fallen", who narrowed about the killers with telepathic abilities who played chess to lives in any irrepanable people.
The main work published during this period was 2 parts of the fantastic epic "Hyperion" and "Fall of Hyperion", in which Simmons has imagined experience, copied in the history of world literature, and fully revealed his own writer talent.
Another product in the genre of cosmic fiction was the dilogy called "Martian Iliad", consisting of books "Ilion" and "Olympus". This time the author appealed to the ancient Greek epic, created many centuries ago by the Great Homer, and in his own way rewrote the events of the Trojan War.
Simmons's talent fans with impatience were waiting for the screening of these works, but the shooting was constantly transferred, the release date was delayed indefinitely. The same happened with the "Hyperion songs", which, with good execution, could overshadow the popular series "Game of Thrones", but the directors were afraid to take into such a complex project, and the film was never launched into production.
Other fate waited for the Book "Terror", written and published in 2007. A series of tragic and fantastic events that occurred with the participants of the Maritime Expedition to the North-Western Passage, in 2018, formed the basis of the eponymous series, the 1st season of which was successful on the American Cable Channel AMC.
In general, in every book of the writer, the literary language and artistic techniques are aimed at creating a special atmosphere that emphasizes what is happening in the context of a specific time and place. So, in the book "Children of Nights", where events unfold in Romania and Transylvania, the author with the help of color epithets immersed the reader into the world of the fortuners of the Blood County Count Dracula, implying the era of the revolution, which abandoned the life of hundreds of innocent people.
Personal life
The first and the only wife of Dan Simmons was his long-standing girlfriend Karen Lords. The couple was combined with a marriage in 1982 and since then never parted.
In 1987, the fee received from the sale of "Kali songs", the spouses bought a house in the town of Front Raj, where their only daughter Jane was born on the end of the work on "Hyperion".
Literary work required a privacy, and a young family began to build a cozy estate in a windwalk, choosing a relatively smooth plot in the Rocky Mountains. Soon the house, located at an altitude of 2.5 thousand m and guarded by a huge figure of shracy, accepted guests, and the further events of the writer's personal life unfolded there.
Many fans dreamed of seeing the place where Dan created the best works, but the writer does not lead an account in Instagram and does not allow journalists to photograph his dwelling.
Dan Simmons now
Fans of creativity Dan Simmons are accustomed to the fact that the writer annually publishes a new story or novel. But in the 2010s, only 3 books appeared in the stores: the psychological detective "Flashback", a fantastic thriller "abomination" and the criminal drama "Fifth Heart", which entered the series "free translating. Sherlock Holmes".It turned out that the author worked on a new product and on March 3, 2019 published an excerpt from the Roman Omega Canyon on Facebook.
Quotes
- "It is better to break the ridge to man than the root of the book."
- "The life is damn cruel. The priceless memories are lost among everyday little things. "
- "We all darker souls."
- "When you deal with fools, after some time you begin to understand the course of their thoughts."
- "The empathy and love are inseparable and incomprehensible."
Bibliography
- 1985 - "Song Kali"
- 1989 - "Joy Fallen"
- 1989 - "Hyperion"
- 1990 - "Fall of Hyperion"
- 1991 - "Summer Night"
- 1992 - "Children of Nights"
- 1996 - "Endimion"
- 1997 - "Endimon's Sunrise"
- 1999 - Bell on Ham "
- 2003 - "Ilion"
- 2005 - "Olympus"
- 2007 - "Terror"
- 2009 - "Drud, or man in black"
- 2011 - "abomination"
- 2015 - "Fifth Heart"
- 2019 - Omega Canyon