Robert Reed was born in New York City, New York, on August 10,1921. He received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin and an M.A. from Columbia University, where he studied under the poet and critic T.S
Eliot. In 1945 he took a one-year leave from Columbia to serve as a navigator in the U.S. Navy during World War II, flying bombing missions to the Japanese home islands and Okinawa.
After leaving active duty, Reed went to work as a journalist at The Washington Post and Newsweek before becoming a full-time writer in 1956, first as a radio commentator for NBC radio and then as a speechwriter for the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1959 to 1961. In 1961 he took a leave of absence from Newsweek to write his first novel, The Green Berets, which was published by Macmillan in 1963 and has been translated into twenty languages around the world since its debut.
Reed's other works include The Water Is Wide (1968), The Latecomers (1971), The Pilgrims of Hope (1971), The Debt (1975), The Silver Crown (1977), America: An Empire Divided (1979), A Land Remembered (1980), The Man Who Loved America (1982), These Thousand Hills (1987), and The Last Voyage of Vasco de Gama (1999).
The burden of intelligence: you can always imagine all those wonderful places where you can never belong.Robert Reed
Perfection is insignificant. Is boring.Robert Reed
Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.Robert Reed
