From the 1950s through the 1980s John D. MacDonald was one of the most popular and prolific writers in America. He was a crime writer who managed to break free of the genre and finally get serious consideration from critics. Seventy of his novels and more that five hundred of his short stories were published in his lifetime. When he died in 1986, more than seventy million copies of his books had been sold.

When an author has created a fictitious character as strongly defined as John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, readers not only feel they "know" the character, they begin to wonder whether the creation is a reflection of the author. In The Red Hot Typewriter, Hugh Merrill shows readers the real person behind McGee and the myriad other characters in MacDonald's novels and lets them answer the question to their own satisfaction.

An author's biography allows for deeper speculation, too. Did the character of Eugene MacDonald, the stern moralist whose secular prophet was Horatio Alger, inform the life of his son? Did the protagonist of Rags to Riches inspire MacDonald to succeed in the uncertain career of the novelist? Or did MacDonald turn against his father's precepts because of the older man's jealous abuse of John D.'s mother until her health was ruined? Now readers can make informed guesses about these and other questions.

What is clear is the dimension that the writer added to his fiction -- a dimension that made MacDonald a kind of catalyst between the founders of the hardboiled detective story like Chandler and Hammett and today's noir writers. He was one of the first authors, and surely the most widely read at the time, to weave into the adventures of his spirited protagonist a concern for the natural environment, resistance to spreading urbanization, and other, now commonplace, social issues. And skillful writer that he was, he found ways to integrate his ideas seamlessly in the action of his lusty tales...