Biography of Theodore Taylor

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Theodore Taylor was born in North Carolina, and he thought of himself as strongly rooted in the “red clay” country by the Catawba River, even though he has worked and lived in many places throughout the world (Taylor). Growing up, his family was poor. He spent a bunch of time outdoors. Sometimes he went fishing with his father at the Hatteras Banks, a location that would eventually become the backdrop to his “Cape Hatteras Trilogy” of novels for young adults (Miller). Theodore also served during World War II. He first served as a cadet-AB seaman on a gasoline tanker, first of four merchant ships. He then became a naval officer in the Pacific Theater. A few months after the Korean War began; he was called to active duty.
Theodore began writing at the age of thirteen. His stories covered high school sports events for the Portsmouth Virginia Evening Star. He left home at seventeen to join the Washington, D.C. Daily News as a copyboy. He discovered the highly educational aspects of living on eleven dollars a week. By the age of nineteen, he was writing radio network sports for NBC, in New York. A year after his first book, The Magnificent Mitscher, Taylor joined Paramount Pictures as a press agent. He then became a story editor, and finally he became associate producer. He got to work with Raquel Welch, Charlton Heston, Steve McQueen, William Holden, Shirley MacLaine, Frank Sinatra, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, and others, on seventeen major pictures (Taylor).
Upon getting up each morning, Theodore Taylor looked forward to going into his jumbled office and striking away at his old dinosaur of a typewriter. He would tell his family, “I want to die hunched over that typewriter, working away on a story.” He loved his readers and his fans. E...

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...ivilege to meet him and those who know him only through the words he wrote. His family takes great comfort in knowing that his legacy lives on in his works that will surely delight and entertain readers for years to come.
Theodore Taylor had come a long way from his hard scrabble roots in North Carolina. He would be the first to say that his eighty-five years on earth were as good as they come. His life’s adventures took him to wild and wooly places among them exotic lands, the high seas, World War II and Hollywood movie sets, boxing rings, and the press room of some of the world’s best newspapers. He collected scraps of stories and interesting characters along the way. His readers go on many of the adventures and meet memorable people and animals with him as they read his books. He often said “I don’t have much of an imagination,” but his family didn’t believe him.

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