"Vampire, Vampire!" » Said the CIC speaker aboard Ticonderoga. "We have many missiles coming. Unarmed."1Tom Clancy, the best modern fiction writer and probably one of the best of all time. Above was an excerpt from his second number one bestseller, Red Storm Rising. Tom Clancy is a civil genius who knows more about top-secret weapons systems than the men who designed them. This makes for an explosive story, which could be real. It was his gripping plots and powerful descriptions of battle scenes that drew me and millions of other Americans to his masterpieces. Ironically, Mr. Clancy's dream of becoming a writer did not come true until he wrote The Hunt for Red October in 1984. Until then, he was an insurance salesman whose previous stories had been turned down . That's another thing I love about Mr. Clancy, he doesn't give up. Clancy once said, “In America, there are no excuses. You can go out and do anything you please if you try hard enough. »2 Ultimately, this author was the only one who did not challenge me. sleep with a cup of warm milk.Thomas L. Clancy Jr., son of a mailman and department store credit clerk, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1947. He attended a parochial Catholic elementary and secondary school . Most of his friends were interested in sports and followed their favorite teams throughout the season, but Tom had more important things on his mind like guns, tanks, and planes. He went to Loyola College, a Jesuit liberal arts college in Baltimore where he majored in English. While attending college, he joined the ROTC to serve in Vietnam, but poor eyesight prevented him from fulfilling his desire. The first short story he wrote was rejected by Analog Sci-Fi magazine, shattering another dream of having his name on a book. In 1973, he became an insurance agent, as he was not making progress as a writer. Eventually, he joined his wife's father's insurance agency and later purchased it in 1980 for $125,000. It was an established business with around 1,000 customers. Tom was so efficient and his business so profitable that he could get all the work done in the morning and have the rest of the day to devour all kinds of technical magazines and articles.3 After his writing career took off in 1984 , he eventually moved to a 400-acre estate on the Chesapeake Bay.