L. Ron Hubbard's remarkably versatile career as an internationally best-selling writer spanned more than half a century of literary achievement and wide-ranging influence. In scope and productivity, it ultimately encompassed more than 530 works—over sixty-three million words—of published fiction and nonfiction. Esteemed as a writer's writer, with an unstinting personal dedication to helping other writers, especially beginners, become more proficient and successful at their craft, he also carved out significant careers in other professional fields—as an explorer, mariner and aviator, filmmaker and photographer, philosopher and educator, and musician and composer.

He grew up in the ruggedly open terrain of a still-frontier Montana, was riding horses by the time he was three, and by the age of six had been initiated as a blood brother of a Blackfoot Indian medicine man. While still a teenager, before the advent of modern commercial air transportation, he journeyed more than a quarter of a million miles by sea and land into areas of the Far East then rarely visited by Westerners, broadening his knowledge of other peoples and cultures.

Returning to the United States from his early travels in the Far East in 1929, Mr. Hubbard studied at George Washington University where he became president of the Flying Club and secretary of the Engineering Society, and wrote articles, stories and a prize-winning play for the school's newspaper and literary magazine.

A daredevil pilot, he barnstormed across the United States in gliders and early powered aircraft, becoming a correspondent and photographer for the Sportsman Pilot, one of the most important national aviation magazines of its day. Then, at the age of twenty-five, with his reputation as a writer of popular fiction already prominently established, he was elected president of the New York Chapter of the American Fiction Guild, whose membership at the time included Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Edgar Rice Burroughs. He subsequently also worked in Hollywood, writing the story and script for Columbia's 1937 box-office hit serial The Secret of Treasure Island, and as a screenwriter and script consultant on numerous films for Columbia, Universal and other studios.

Throughout L. Ron Hubbard's richly diverse life, he also embraced, from childhood, a profound love of the sea. He was a skilled navigator and a Master Mariner licensed to sail ships on the waters of any ocean. Mr. Hubbard served with distinction as a naval officer during the Second World War, while in earlier years he had already led several sea and land expeditions. In July 1940 he set out from Seattle, Washington aboard a large sailing vessel he affectionately called, "The Maggie"—flying Flag 105 of the prestigious Explorers Club (one of three times he carried an Explorers Club flag while on expedition)—to chart what were then the uncertain hazards of the inland passage to Alaska and to officially test an experimental radio-navigational device.

L. Ron Hubbard, of course, brought his faithful typewriter along on that adventurous Alaskan journey—he was, then and always, first and foremost a writer. He once described his own writer's creed as always "… trying harder to make every word live and breathe."