Richard Preston
Novelist
Famous for his bestselling thriller The Hot Zone, as well as for his 2002 work The Demon in the Freezer, this fiction and nonfiction author also worked as a journalist for the New Yorker.
He and his brother, fellow top-selling writer Douglas Preston, grew up near Boston, Massachusetts. The brothers both graduated from Pomona College in Southern California.
He published his debut nonfiction work, First Light: The Search for the Edge of the Universe, in the late 1980s. His first novel, The Cobra Event, followed a decade later.
He and his wife, Michelle, settled in New Jersey with their three children.
In 2011, Preston finished writing Micro, a novel that author Michael Crichton had been working on at the time of his death.