Growing up in the Depression, MacDonald was determined to become a success. He graduated from Syracuse University in 1938 and obtained an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1939. With a wife and young son to support, he enlisted in the Army as a First Lieutenant in the Ordinance Department eighteen months before Pearl Harbor. Promoted to Captain, he was shipped to India and was later transferred to the Office of Strategic Services. It was while he was stationed in India that his wife, Dordo (short for Dorothy), began encouraging John to try creative writing as an outlet for his restlessness. When MacDonald was discharged as a Lieutenant Colonel at Fort Dix, New Jersey in 1945, he was met by his wife who gave him the good news that his short story, “Interlude in India,” had been sold to Story magazine for $25.

Soon afterwards, MacDonald discovered the world of pulp fiction. He spent eighty hours a week at his red hot typewriter banging out hundreds of stories at the going rate of a penny a word. When pulp fiction died as a result of the introduction of paperbacks, MacDonald published his first novel, The Brass Cupcake, as a Gold Medal original. Living in Sarasota, Florida, he became active in a writer’s colony that included Bud Schullberg, Leslie Charles McFarlane (writing as Franklin W. Dixon), and MacKinlay Kantor. Every Friday, MacDonald joined his writer’s group for lunch at the Plaza Restaurant. In 1952, Fawcett published MacDonald’s novel The Damned as a Gold Medal paperback. It sold two million copies.  MacDonald was on a roll. At one point, he bet MacKinlay Kantor $50 he could write a novel in thirty days that would be a book club selection and also be made into a movie. The novel was The Executioners which later was made into the movie titled Cape Fear starring Robert Mitchum.

MacDonald began working on the Travis McGee series in 1962. The series featured McGee, working as a “salvage consultant,” while living on a houseboat named the Busted Flush anchored at Slip F-18, Bahia Mar Marina, in Fort Lauderdale. Sitting around a bar in New York City named the Red Devil, MacDonald and his entourage came up with the idea of using colors to distinguish one McGee book from another. Again, he was ahead of his time. The McGee series went on to sell millions but never evolved to the big screen.

In 1984, MacDonald completed the Lonely Silver Rain, the 21^st Travis McGee mystery and the last in the series. MacDonald and his wife enjoyed taking cruises until they both became afflicted with deteriorating health problems. MacDonald died at seventy years of age of chronic respiratory complications following coronary bypass in December, 1986. As MacDonald wrote in a letter to Elmore Leonard shortly before his passing, there was “a lot of it going around.” His wife, Dordo, died fourteen months later from cancer. They were survived by their son, Maynard MacDonald.

MacDonald once said, “It is difficult to assess the career of a writer who almost made it.” We can be sure no one will ever say such a thing about John D. MacDonald.