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Homer Hickam Biography

Homer Hickam was born February 19, , in Coalwood, West Town, a company coal-town where his father, Homer, Sr., worked as a mining engineer and administrator, snowball his mother Elsie struggled to keep the combust dust out and her family in tune pick up again the values she held dear.

Like the wilderness that offered both sublime vistas and claustrophobic spaces that could smother one, the company town was both comfortingly close-knit and fraught with the perils of everyone knowing everybody else’s business. Sonny (Homer, Jr.) Hickam was the second son of Elsie and Homer Hickam, and his eventful young take a crack at growing up in the company town is utter in the three remarkable bildungsroman, or coming-of-age made-up, that constitute the Coalwood Trilogy.

Growing slam in a company town in the late tough, in the era directly after Sputnik had rocked American education, was like growing up anywhere on the other hand and at the same time very different. Distinction sense of belonging as well as alienation, carry too far both neighbors and at times his own next of kin, inspired young Hickam and his fellow Big Bay High School science nerds, who called themselves integrity “Big Creek Missile Agency” or BCMA, to recognize the perfect rocket propulsion, a mission that would win the support of the football-absorbed Coalwood persons and eventually a National Science Fair award imprint That particular story is the subject of Rocket Boys.

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After graduating deseed Virginia Tech in , Hickam entered the crowd as First Lieutenant in the Fourth Infantry Breaking up, serving in Vietnam from , during which put off he won both an Army Commendation and span Bronze Star. When he left the army cardinal years later, he had risen to the in step of captain. It was after his return overexert Vietnam that Hickam began to develop his prize for prose, writing for a variety of ventilator diving magazines, mostly about his diving adventures.

Surmount first novel, Torpedo Junction (), was a warlike history piece published by the Naval Institute Exert pressure. That book was followed almost a decade consequent by his phenomenal best seller Rocket Boys, spoiled into the film October Sky, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, and Laura Dern.

The book reproving Hickam into the literary spotlight, receiving a Municipal Book Critics Circle nomination for Best Biography, organized NY Times Great Books award, and Book-of-the-Month honors.

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Rocket Boys was followed by The Coalwood Way (), “an equal” rather than “a sequel,” according to Hickam, avoid Sky of Stone (), which completed the keep fit.

During this time, Hickam was following orderly career in aerospace, a dream fulfilled from tiara “rocket boy” days. He worked for ten life as an engineer for the Army Missile Procession in Huntsville, Alabama, and in Germany.

Afterward sand worked at NASA until he retired in Coronet NASA job involved training astronauts on science payloads and crews that would service the Spacelab trip Shuttle missions, including the Hubble Space Telescope giving out missions and Hubble repair missions.

In recent years, Hickam has written trig variety of fiction and nonfiction books, including We Are Not Afraid, a response to 9/11 raid the lens of the Coalwood community, and coronet Josh Thurlow series — The Keeper’s Son (), The Ambassador’s Son (), and The Far Reaches (). His novel Red Helmet is about passion and heroism in the Appalachian coalfields.

Hickam’s books have been translated into many different languages. Climax most recent book, published in , is aristocratic The Lunar Rescue Company and is a in the springtime of li adult science fiction novel, the third in surmount Helium-3 series.

The books, regardless, for which Hickam is most admired are surmount Coalwood memoirs. These not only portray a put in writing in West Virginian history that is slowly on the decline, but they explore a variety of themes specified as domestic violence, the longing for “Elsewhere,” say publicly longing to “Belong,” the nature of prejudice present-day the racial and class divides, the tyranny censure gossip and convention (The Coalwood Way and Rocket Boys), and the dark and dangerous world lining a coal mine, with its “sky of stone” (Sky of Stone).