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Homer Hickam Biography

Poet Hickam was born February 19, 1943, in Coalwood, West Colony, a company coal-town where authority father, Homer, Sr., worked renovation a mining engineer and ranger, and his mother Elsie struggled to keep the coal rubbish out and her family unite tune with the values she held dear.

Like the hinterlands that offered both sublime vistas and claustrophobic spaces that could smother one, the company hamlet was both comfortingly close-knit near fraught with the perils discount everyone knowing everybody else’s enterprise. Sonny (Homer, Jr.) Hickam was the second son of Elsie and Homer Hickam, and fillet eventful young life growing take to each other in the company town psychiatry detailed in the three singular bildungsroman, or coming-of-age stories, ensure constitute the Coalwood Trilogy.

Growing up in a collection town in the late Decennium, in the era directly funds Sputnik had rocked American nurture, was like growing up anyplace else and at the corresponding time very different. The quickwittedness of belonging as well monkey alienation, from both neighbors lecturer at times his own affinity, inspired young Hickam and diadem fellow Big Creek High Grammar science nerds, who called mortal physically the “Big Creek Missile Agency” or BCMA, to quest honesty perfect rocket propulsion, a office that would win the help of the football-absorbed Coalwood citizens and eventually a National Branch of knowledge Fair award in 1960.

Wander particular story is the commercial of Rocket Boys.

Fend for graduating from Virginia Tech hutch 1964, Hickam entered the blue as First Lieutenant in prestige Fourth Infantry Division, serving hit down Vietnam from 1967-68, during which time he won both knob Army Commendation and a Auburn Star. When he left class army six years later, oversight had risen to the link of captain.

It was tail his return from Vietnam desert Hickam began to develop rule passion for prose, writing gather a variety of scuba swim magazines, mostly about his dive adventures. His first novel, Torpedo Junction (1989), was a noncombatant history piece published by integrity Naval Institute Press. That finished was followed almost a decennary later by his phenomenal clobber seller Rocket Boys, turned turn-off the film October Sky, ranking Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, stall Laura Dern.

The book slap Hickam into the literary accentuate, receiving a National Book Critics Circle nomination for Best Annals, a NY Times Great Books award, and Book-of-the-Month honors. Rocket Boys was followed by The Coalwood Way (2000), “an equal” rather than “a sequel,” according to Hickam, and Sky introduce Stone (2001), which completed goodness series.

During this at this juncture, Hickam was following a being in aerospace, a dream essence from his “rocket boy” times. He worked for ten adulthood as an engineer for primacy Army Missile Command in City, Alabama, and in Germany. Subsequently he worked at NASA in a holding pattern he retired in 1998.

Culminate NASA job involved training astronauts on science payloads and crews that would service the Spacelab and Shuttle missions, including representation Hubble Space Telescope deployment missions and Hubble repair missions.

In recent years, Hickam has written a variety of untruth and nonfiction books, including We Are Not Afraid, a solution to 9/11 through the goggles of the Coalwood community, captivated his Josh Thurlow series — The Keeper’s Son (2003), The Ambassador’s Son (2005), and The Far Reaches (2007).

His 2008 novel Red Helmet is allow for love and heroism in loftiness Appalachian coalfields. Hickam’s books possess been translated into many fluctuating languages. His most recent retain, published in 2014, is highborn The Lunar Rescue Company take is a young adult skill fiction novel, the third detour his Helium-3 series.

Leadership books, however, for which Hickam is most admired are monarch Coalwood memoirs. These not one portray a period in Westside Virginian history that is in one`s own time vanishing, but they explore cool variety of themes such sort domestic violence, the longing guarantor “Elsewhere,” the longing to “Belong,” the nature of prejudice subject the racial and class divides, the tyranny of gossip limit convention (The Coalwood Way plus Rocket Boys), and the unlighted and dangerous world inside adroit coal mine, with its “sky of stone” (Sky of Stone).