James Bassett (author)

James E. Bassett, Jr. (1912 – September 24, 1978) was an American newspaper editor and author, most notably of the best-selling novel Harm's Way that was later adapted into a major motion picture.

Biography

The son of James E. and Lucille R. Bassett, Bassett was born in Glendale, California.

Raised in Mamaroneck, New York, from 1914 on, in 1934 he graduated cum laude from Bowdoin College in Maine, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After college, he returned to Los Angeles, California, and joined the Los Angeles Times as a reporter. He later served the paper as aviation writer, political analyst and director of the editorial pages until he was named associate editor in 1971. At The Mirror, the Times' sister publication, he held the posts of political editor, feature editor and city editor.

He entered the United States Navy as lieutenant junior grade in February, 1941, and went on to become public relations officer for Fleet Admiral William F. (Bull) Halsey. He later retired from the service as a captain, and returned to work at The Times. He held the Bronze Star with combat V.

Bassett took leaves from The Times to serve in Richard Nixon's vice presidential and presidential campaigns of 1952, 1956 and 1960. He was public relations director for the Republican National Committee in 1954.

Bassett drew on his World War II experiences for his novel Harm's Way, which became a bestseller after its publication in 1962 and was made into a motion picture starring John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and Henry Fonda and directed by Otto Preminger.

Other works include Commander Prince, USN published in 1971, a novel dealing mainly with the events surrounding the Battle of the Java Sea, and The Sky Suspended, published in 1968.

Bassett retired October 1977 after serving 43 years on the staffs of the Los Angeles Times and The Mirror. He was working on two books at the time of his death – one an autobiography and the other a volume on great sea admirals he had observed in the Pacific in World War II. He died in Malibu, California.

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gollark: At last, I have managed to read my ebooks on a non-Amazon reader and it only took installing Calibre, installing the DeDRM plugin, copying over the folder on my tablet's SD card to my laptop via MTP, importing that, finding out that it recognized the metadata fine but could not actually view the contents, trawling the internet for somewhat dubious old copies of Kindle for PC, installing that in Wine, frantically turning off "automatically update" options before it did something, downloading my books, deregistering old devices because apparently I have a limited amount of devices available per book, downloading the ones which complained, figuring out where the Kindle for PC thing actually saved old books to, running the DeDRM DRM key finding thing, finding that that, not very unexpectedly, didn't work with a Wine install, installing Python 2 in Wine, running the DRM key finding script within the not-really-Windows-install, importing the key into the plugin, and then importing all the book files.
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