Richard Jessup

Mr. Jessup spent his early years in and out of a local orphanage before running away to sea as a merchant seaman. In an interview in 1970, he said that he had read himself around the world, ferreting out English-language bookshops at each port of call and reading a book a day while at sea. During this time, he copied War and Peace on a typewriter whilst afloat, corrected all the errors, then threw the work over the side. In 1948 he left the sea behind and began a career as a full-time writer, averaging 10 hours a day at the typewriter.

His best-known work, The Cincinnati Kid, published in 1964 in hardcover and later made into a motion picture with Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann Margaret and Tuesday Weld, was highly praised in The Times. Mr. Jessup has brilliantly enlarged the microcosm of the gambling table, to make it a genuine setting for a novel, said the reviewer. Within its circle, men act out, again and again, their commitment against the gratuitousness and terror of fate. Some turn into machines that bleed inside. And others come to know finally that they are human beings.