One year later, my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died from bone cancer, and thereafter my fiction tended to depict the search for a son, particularly in Fireflies (1988) and Desperate Measures (1994). With two professions, I worked seven days a week until exhaustion forced me to make a painful choice and resign from the university in 1986. During this period, I was a professor of American literature at the University of Iowa. The search for a father is prominent in that book, as it is in later ones, most notably The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), a thriller about orphans and spies. The result of their influence is my 1972 novel, First Blood, which introduced Rambo. Eventually I decided to be a writer and sought help from two men who became metaphorical fathers to me: Stirling Silliphant, the head writer for the classic TV series "Route 66" about two young men in a Corvette who travel America in search of themselves, and Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), a novelist who taught at the Pennsylvania State University where I went to graduate school from 1966 to 1970. I grew up unsure of who I was, desperately in need of a father figure. My mother had difficulty raising me and at the same time holding a job, so she put me in an orphanage and later in a series of boarding homes. My father was killed during World War II, shortly after I was born in 1943.
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