Michael CrichtonEssay Preview: Michael CrichtonReport this essayCrichton was born in Chicago, Illinois to John Henderson Crichton and Zula Miller Crichton, and raised in Roslyn, Long Island, New York. Crichton has two sisters, Kimberly and Catherine, and a younger brother, Douglas, a co-author on the pseudonymously published “Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues.”
He attended Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts as an undergraduate, graduating summa cum laude in 1964. Crichton was also initiated into the honors organization Phi Beta Kappa. He went on to become the Henry Russell Shaw Travelling Fellow, 1964-65 and Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at Cambridge University, England, 1965. He graduated at Harvard Medical School, gaining an M.D. in 1969 and did post-doctoral fellowship study at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California, in 1969-1970. In 1988, he was Visiting Writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While in medical school, he wrote novels under the pen names John Lange and Jeffery Hudson. A Case of Need, written under the latter pseudonym, won the 1969 Edgar Award for Best Novel. He also co-authored Dealing with his younger brother Douglas under the shared pen name Michael Douglas. The back cover of that book contains a picture of Michael and Douglas at a very young age taken by their mother. His two pen names were both created to reflect his above average height. According to his own words, he was about six foot nine inches tall in 1997. Lange means “tall one” in German, Danish and Dutch, and Sir Jeffrey Hudson was a famous seventeenth century dwarf in the court of Queen Henrietta Maria of England.
Crichton has admitted to having once, during his undergraduate study, plagiarized a work by George Orwell and submitted it as his own. According to Crichton the paper was received by his professor with a mark of “B−”. Crichton has claimed that the plagiarism was not intended to defraud the school, but rather as an experiment. Crichton believed that the professor in question had been intentionally giving him abnormally low marks, and so as an experiment Crichton informed another professor of his idea and submitted Orwells paper as his own. Crichton has been married five times and divorced four times. He has been married to Suzanna Childs, Joan Radam (1965-1970), Kathy St. Johns (1978-1980) and Anne-Marie Martin, the mother of his only child, daughter Taylor. Crichton
Crichton’s alleged plagiarism is now at the National Center for Education Statistics’ website, which explains:
In 1975, in order to avoid litigation, Professor C. C. Crichton developed a theory that he then borrowed from other authors to construct a more comprehensive and accurate account of all books, lectures, lectures and other academic material that are published on the Internet for the sole purpose of illustrating the relevance and value of each book for young people. He called on the public to take notice that he, for example, has borrowed a large number of books from over 400 academic publications, and not once has the author himself or any other person admitted to have provided a list of the books he has read. And he, too, has borrowed from many books that are neither published nor received in print.
The new study found that of about 100,000 books published or received in print, the least cited by Crichton in his account is a work by Thomas Paine in the 1887 edition of The American Prospect, which was a highly regarded and widely read text in the 1870’s, but was dismissed by the editor on August 28, 1994, after he made comments that might have been an attempt to defraud Crichton.
As Slate.com’s Eric Tucker explains on his blog and its website, most of the remaining 17.4 million books in Crichton’s database, including over 300,000 academic editions, have either been withdrawn or no longer exist, leading to the suggestion of “this is not how academia works,” as Tucker writes. In 2013, Crichton was fired after he publicly defrauded the government out of $3.4 million, with the University of Toronto.
If these allegations are true, then the possibility of Crichton’s plagiarism continues to grow. “It would appear that this is not what the University should be doing, and the University ought to avoid the situation that is already there,” wrote The College Fix. After all, “We could probably use a little more publicity to promote books that are replete with real data.” (In 2014, The College Fix also ran a cover story on Crichton’s alleged plagiarism, which was made in 2012):
In November, a U.S. Supreme Court judge ruled against the University of Toronto citing public safety and scientific independence in the case which Crichton was charged with plagiarizing in 2014. That suit is still pending.
The College Fix ran a story reporting that the federal government is poised — on Monday — to issue subpoenas to academic institutions to look into claims that C. C. Crichton’s works are on the Internet without its consent, while a report earlier this month reported a “procedural court order prohibiting any institution from using the text of any given book to solicit public or corporate donations.”
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According to that report, the lawsuit “seeks information that would allow us to protect the freedom of the Internet