Biographie d'Alistair MaClean
Alistair MacLean was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1922. He was the son of a church minister and was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, during the Second World War, he left school and joined the Royal Navy. After the war he obtained a degree in English literature at Glasgow University and then became a schoolteacher, but in 1954 he won a short story competition run by the Glasgow Herald newspaper, and was invited by a publisher to mite a novel.
His first novel, HMS Ulysses (1955), soon became a bestseller. It was based on his wartime experiences at sea and tells the terrifying story of a warship and the brave men who fought and died in the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean. After the success of his next war store, The Guns of Navarone (1957), he gave up teaching and became a full-rime writer. MacLean preferred to call his books "adventure stories" rather than novels, and they are certainly full of excitenment.
Brave men fight their enemies, in conditions of great physical difficulty, all over the world : from the cold Atlantic of his first novel to the heat of the South Seas in South by Java Head (1958); from the icy polar regions in Night Without End (1959) and Ice Station Zebra (1963) to the warmth of Florida in Fear is the Key (1961). In all, he wrote over twenty such stories, most of which sold over a million copies.
Many of them, such as Where Eagles Dare (1967), were made into successful films. Alistair MacLean also wrotc spy stories, and biographies of T. E. Lawrence and Captain Cook. He was awarded a D. Litt. by Glasgow University in 1983, and died in 1987.
