The VERB - January '08

~ Robert Ludlum was born in New York City.

~ He grew up in Short Hills, New Jersey, and attended private schools in Connecticut.

~ At the age of fourteen, he left home to travel with the Broadway production of Junior Miss.

~ During World War II, Ludlum tried to join the Royal Canadian Air Force. That failed, so he joined the US Marine Corps and served in the South Pacific.

~ Two years later he finished his first novel, but lost the manuscript after a night of drinking in San Francisco.

~ After the war, he studied at Wesleyan University, and became the first student of Fine Arts. He received his B.A. in 1951.

~ That same year, he married the actress Mary Ryducha.

~ In the 1950s Ludlum worked as a stage and television actor. He appeared in 200 television dramas, usually as a lawyer or "heavy." Among them were The Kraft Television Theatre, Studio One and Robert Montgomery Presents.

~ In 1957 he became a producer at the North Jersey Playhouse, and in 1960 he opened the Playhouse-on-the-Mall in Paramus.

~ Ludlum produced The Owl and the Pussycat, which featured a then-unknown Alan Alda.

~ Ludlum often said his theatrical training helped him to create the complicated plots that marked his later writings.

~ By 1969, he had grown bored with the theater. At the age of 41, he quit the business to write his first novel, The Scarlatti Inheritance.

~ He received ten rejections before it hit print. It became an immediate bestseller.

~ Ludlum's next thriller, The Osterman Weekend, was made into a film by director Sam Peckinpah.

~ In the mid-1970s, Ludlum became a full-time writer. The family moved to Long Island, where they bought a two-hundred-year-old clapboard farmhouse.

~ Ludlum also traveled widely to collect background material for his novels, especially The Bourne Identity.

~ The Bourne series would later be voted the Top Bestseller Spy Thrillers of All Time.

~ Many of his readers were convinced Ludlum must have been a spy himself. But he insisted he just used his imagination.

~ Three of his college roommates ended up in intelligence, and some of his best friends worked for the CIA.

~ Ludlum feared the computer. He wrote longhand on yellow legal pads. His wife, and later his secretary, typed his notes.

~ Ludlum also published books under the pseudonyms Jonathan Ryder and Michael Shepherd.

~ Ludlum died of a heart attack in Naples, Florida, at the age of 74.

~ He wrote twenty-one novels, and all became New York Times bestsellers.

~ Since Ludlum's death, his estate has worked with a carefully selected author and editor to prepare his work for publication.