Robert Crichton

Robert Crichton (1925-1993) was a novelist and magazine writer. Born in New Mexico, Crichton spent most of his life in New York after serving in the Army during World War II in the Battle of the Bulge and graduating from Harvard in 1951. Crichton's first book, The Great Impostor (1960), told the true story of Fred Demara, an impostor who successfully assumed scores of guises including that of a Trappist monk, Texas prison warden and surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy. The bestselling book was adapted into a 1961 movie starring Tony Curtis. A follow-up, The Rascal and the Road, was a memoir about Crichton's adventures with Demara.