William Brinkley

Career

Brinkley served as a commissioned officer in the United States Navy during World War II, with assignments in Europe and the Pacific focused on public relations. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1940, he worked for The Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He then became a reporter for The Washington Post from 1941 to 1942 and again from 1949 to 1951; during the latter period he wrote an article about an exorcism that later inspired William Peter Blatty's novel The Exorcist.

From 1951 to 1958 he was a staff writer, correspondent, and assistant editor for Life magazine, and he remained a member of the National Press Club until his death. Following his naval service, Brinkley published his first novel, Quicksand, in 1948. His only non-fiction book, The Deliverance of Sister Cecelia, a biography of a Czechoslovak nun based on her memoirs as recited to him, appeared in 1954 and was adapted into a 1955 episode of Climax!.

In 1956 he released the best-selling novel Don't Go Near the Water, a comedy about U.S. Navy sailors in the South Pacific during World War II; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer adapted it into a 1957 film that was both a critical and commercial success. Brinkley published The Fun House in 1961, a comedy set in the offices of a picture magazine similar to Life, followed by The Two Susans in 1962 and The Ninety and Nine in 1966, the latter detailing life aboard a U.S. Navy LST operating in the Mediterranean and at Anzio during World War II.

After moving to McAllen, Texas in 1971, he wrote only one novel during the 1970s, Breakpoint (1978), about tennis. His next novel, Peeper (December 1981), was a comedy about a voyeur in the small town of Martha, Texas. His final work, The Last Ship, published in March 1988, is a post-apocalyptic fiction novel about the crew of a fictional U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer surviving a global nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Did You Know?

• Brinkley was the youngest of five children and the son of a Baptist minister.
• He died by suicide at his home in McAllen, Texas, and his ashes were scattered in the Gulf of Mexico.