William Brinkley

Early life and education

Brinkley was born in Custer City, Oklahoma on September 10, 1917, the son of Daniel Squire Brinkley, a Baptist minister. The youngest of five children, Brinkley attended the University of Oklahoma and graduated as a Phi Beta Kappa in 1940.

Naval service

Brinkley was a commissioned officer in the United States Navy during World War II, where he served in Europe and the Pacific, primarily in public relations duties.

Writing

After graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1940, Brinkley went on to work for The Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Afterwards, Brinkley was a reporter for The Washington Post from 1941 to 1942 and from 1949 to 1951. In the latter period he wrote an article about an exorcism that later became the basis of William Peter Blatty's bestselling novel The Exorcist (1971). Brinkley was also a staff writer, correspondent, and assistant editor for Life magazine from 1951 to 1958 and a member of the National Press Club until his death in 1993.

After his tenure as an officer in the U.S. Navy, Brinkley wrote and published his first novel, Quicksand (1948). In 1954, Brinkley wrote his only non-fiction book, The Deliverance of Sister Cecelia, a biography of a Czechoslovakian nun based her memoirs as recited to him. The novel was later adapted into an episode of Climax! in 1955. In 1956, he went on to write the best-selling novel and perhaps his most prominent work, Don't Go Near the Water, a comedy about U.S. Navy sailors serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Don't Go Near the Water would later be adapted into film by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as Don't Go Near the Water (1957), which was released in theaters across the United States and became both a critical and commercial success.

In 1961, Brinkley wrote and published The Fun House, a comedy novel set in the offices of a picture magazine, similar to that of Life. The following year, in 1962, Brinkley wrote and published the novel, The Two Susans, which was followed by The Ninety and Nine (1966), a novel detailing life on board a United States Navy LST operating in the Mediterranean Sea and at Anzio during World War II. In 1971, Brinkley moved to McAllen, Texas and would live there until his death in 1993. Throughout the 1970s, Brinkley only wrote one novel, Breakpoint (1978), about tennis.

Breakpoint was followed by Peeper (December 1981), a comedy novel about a voyeur in the small Texas town of Martha, Texas, near the Rio Grande. In March 1988, Brinkley published his last work, The Last Ship, a post-apocalyptic fiction novel dealing with the sailors of the USS Nathan James (DDG-80), a fictional United States Navy guided missile destroyer, which survives a brief, full-scale global nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Later life and death

On November 22, 1993, after suffering from a major depressive disorder for over several years, Brinkley died by suicide at his home in McAllen, Texas, near the Gulf of Mexico, at age 76, from an overdose of barbiturates. He was survived by his wife, Jean Brinkley, along with his sister, Virginia McCabe, who died in 1999, his brother, Paul Brinkley, who died in 2000, and his stepson, David Shelander, who died in September 2013. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Gulf of Mexico.