Richard McKenna

Richard Milton McKenna (May 9, 1913 – November 1, 1964) was an American sailor and fiction writer.

McKenna was born in Mountain Home, Idaho, on May 9, 1913.

Seeking more opportunities than could be found in such a rural part of the country at the height of the Great Depression, McKenna joined the U.S. Navy in 1931. He served for 22 years, including 10 years of active sea duty. He served in both World War II and the Korean War, and retired shortly afterwards as a Chief Machinist's Mate.

Because of the benefits of the GI Bill, McKenna was able to attend college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he studied creative writing. He also married a librarian, Eva, whom he met at the college.

McKenna began his writing career publishing science fiction, and starting in 1958 he regularly attended the annual Milford Writer's Workshop for science fiction writers. "He had enormous talent," writes his colleague Ben Bova in the book Notes to a Science Fiction Writer. His first science fiction story "Casey Agonistes" immediately established him as a writer to be watched when it appeared in the September 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Only a handful of his science fiction tales were published during his lifetime, but after his death several more appeared posthumously.

McKenna's major work was The Sand Pebbles (1962), a 597-page novel later made into the well-known 1966 film of the same title. The protagonist was an enlisted career sailor on a U.S. Navy river gunboat named the San Pablo in China during the 1920s. McKenna himself served aboard a river gunboat on the Yangtze Patrol, but about ten years after the events in his novel and of more modern construction (San Pablo was an ancient gunboat seized from the Spanish in 1898). The Sand Pebbles won the $10,000 1963 Harper Prize Novel and was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

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