Writer and Journalist. He was an American writer and journalist, best known for his novels Don’t Go Near the Water (1956), which Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer adapted to an eponymous 1957 film, and The Last Ship (1988), which TNT adapted as an 2014–2015 television series. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1940, Brinkley went on to work for The Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Afterwards, Brinkley was a reporter for The Washington Post from 1941 to 1942 and from 1949 to 1951. In the latter period he wrote an article about an exorcism that later became the basis of William Peter Blatty’s bestselling novel The Exorcist (1971). Brinkley was also a staff writer, correspondent, and assistant editor and for Life magazine from 1951 to 1958 and a member of the National Press Club until his death in 1993. After his tenure as an officer in the U.S. Navy, Brinkley wrote and published his first novel, Quicksand (1948). In 1954, Brinkley wrote his only non-fiction book, The Deliverance of Sister Cecelia, a biography of a Czechoslovakian nun based her memoirs as recited to him. The novel was later adapted into an episode of Climax! in 1955.[citation needed] In 1956, he went on to write the best-selling novel and perhaps his most prominent work, Don’t Go Near the Water, a comedy about U.S. Navy sailors serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Don’t Go Near the Water would later be adapted into film by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as Don’t Go Near the Water (1957), which was released in theaters across the United States and became both a critical and commercial success. In peacetime Lieutenant Commander Clinton T. Nash had been in charge of a Merill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Beane office in the Midwest. Not long after Pearl Harbor he had been commissioned directly from his brokerage office without the corrupting effect of any intervening naval training. William Brinkley, Don’t Go Near the Water, Chapter 1. In 1961, Brinkley wrote and published The Fun House, a comedy novel set in the offices of a picture magazine, similar to that of Life. The following year, in 1962, Brinkley wrote and published the novel, The Two Susans, which was followed by The Ninety and Nine (1966), a novel detailing life on board a United States Navy LST operating in the Mediterranean Sea and at Anzio during World War II. In 1971, Brinkley moved to McAllen, Texas and would live there until his death in 1993. Throughout the 1970s, Brinkley only wrote one novel, Breakpoint (1978), about tennis. Breakpoint was followed by Peeper (December 1981), a comedy novel about a voyeur in the small Texas town of Martha, Texas, near the Rio Grande. In March 1988, Brinkley published his last work, The Last Ship, a post-apocalyptic fiction novel dealing with the sailors of the USS Nathan James (DDG-80), a fictional United States Navy guided missile destroyer, which survives a brief, full-scale global nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. (bio courtesy of: Wikipedia)  Family links:  Parents:  Daniel Squire Brinkley (1872 – 1963)  Ruth W. Clark Julian (1886 – 1972)  Siblings:  Obadiah Brinkley (1902 – 1911)**  Robert Daniel Brinkley (1909 – 1985)*  Paul David Brinkley (1910 – 2000)*  Virginia Dale Brinkley McCabe (1912 – 1999)*  Mildred Ann Brinkley Kearns (1914 – 1973)*  William Clark Brinkley (1917 – 1993) *Calculated relationship**Half-sibling