During this period, Preston gave Child a midnight tour of the museum, and in the darkened Hall of Late Dinosaurs, under a looming T. His eight-year stint at the Museum resulted in the non-fiction book, Dinosaurs in the Attic, edited by a rising young star at St. Preston also taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University. After graduating, Preston began his career at the American Museum of Natural History in New York as an editor, writer, and manager of publications. (Richard went on to write The Hot Zone and The Cobra Event, which tells you all you need to know about what it was like to grow up with him as a brother.)Īs they grew up, Doug, Richard, and their little brother David roamed the quiet streets of Wellesley, terrorizing the natives with home-made rockets and incendiary devices mail-ordered from the backs of comic books or concocted from chemistry sets.Īfter unaccountably being rejected by Stanford University (a pox on it), Preston attended Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he studied mathematics, biology, physics, anthropology, and geology, before settling down to English literature. Notable events in his early life included the loss of a fingertip at the age of three to a bicycle the loss of his two front teeth to his brother Richard's fist and various broken bones, also incurred in dust-ups with Richard. Following a distinguished matriculation at a private nursery school, where he was almost immediately expelled, he attended public schools and the Cambridge School of Weston. Bookstores, libraries and other organizations have permission to use either biography.ĭouglas Preston was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1956, and grew up in the deadly boring suburb of Wellesley. This biographical section contains a long and short biography. Photograph by Dave Yoder, National Geographic. Douglas Preston on an expedition to explore a lost city in the Honduran rainforest, 2015.

The Book of the Dead by Douglas Preston