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Gene Wolfe was born in New York City on May 7, 1931. He dropped out of Texas A&M University during his junior year and was drafted into the Army to fight in the Korean War. After the war, he received a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Houston. He worked as an industrial engineer for Procter and Gamble, where he developed the show more machine that cooks the dough used to make Pringles potato chips. He was an editor of the trade journal Plant Engineering from 1972 to 1984 before retiring to become a full-time writer. He wrote more than 30 books during his lifetime including The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, The Book of the New Sun, and The Land Across. He received the Campbell Memorial Award, the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award, the Locus Award four times, and the Nebula Award and the World Fantasy Award two times each. In 1996, he was given the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2007 and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2012. He died after a long battle with heart disease on April 14, 2019 at the age of 87. (Bowker Author Biography) show less