BIOGRAPHY
Ian Fleming is the author of Casino Royale, Live and Let
Die, Moonraker, Diamonds Are Forever, From Russia
with Love, Dr. No, Goldfinger, For your Eyes Only, Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty’s Secret
Service, You Only Live Twice, The Man With The Golden Gun, and Octopussy and the Living Daylights.
He is also the author of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang –
the children’s story about the car which flies.
A series of articles that he wrote for the Sunday
Times about a trip round the world were published in book form,
entitled Thrilling Cities. A
series about the diamond trade, also for the Sunday
Times, was published as The
Diamond Smugglers.
Ian Fleming was
born on
Writing was far from being Fleming’s first or expected career. He tried for the
army after leaving school, but that didn’t work out, and he sat the exams for
the Foreign Office but did not pass high enough to be accepted for a diplomatic
career.
In the thirties, he worked briefly for Reuter’s news agency. This gave him
invaluable experience of writing fast and accurately. But in order to make more
money he became a stockbroker instead – and not a very successful one.
At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, he was recruited to be the
personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, and there, at the
Admiralty, he remained throughout the war. It was his experience in this job
that was to provide many of the characters and incidents that he was to write
about later in the Bond books.
After the war he
became foreign manager for Kemsley newspapers,
working chiefly for the Sunday Times.
But his creative imagination remained under wraps until 1952, When, at the age of 43, he settled down in his house in
He married Ann
Rothermere that same year, after a long on-off relationship. It was his first
marriage and her third. They had one son, Caspar, for whom Ian Fleming wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Fleming died in 1964 of a heart attack,
his Bond books having become enormously successful, and having seen his
character played by Sean Connery in the first two films, Dr No and From
Ian Fleming’
interests included cars, and golf, swimming and snorkelling, and
book-collecting.
He built up a very distinguished book collection. The theme of the collection
was ‘Mile Stones of Human Progress’ and included volumes as diverse as
Einstein’s ‘Theory of Relativity’ and the first book on golf. This collection
now belongs to the Lilly Library at
http://www.ianflemingcentenary.com/ian-fleming.asp