Read Online Dreamer of Dune by Brian Herbert - Free Book Online

selecting her words carefully. Her laugh was gentle, and sometimes she broke into a girlish, nervous giggle.
    Smitten, Frank told Howie, “I’ve just met a Scottish girl with the most beautiful black hair.”
    Actually she was Scottish-American, born Beverly Stuart prior to her mother’s remarriage to a man named David Forbes. Like Frank she read extensively. Her interest in literature went back to her early childhood, when her maternal grandfather, Cooper Landis, introduced her to classic books. (Cooper had once been the traveling secretary of Ralph Waldo Emerson.)
    Beverly told her best friend, Frankie Goodwin, about the young man she had met in writing class, Frank Herbert. Coincidentally, she was struck by his hair, as he had been with hers. “It’s beautiful,” she said, “the color of molten gold.”
    He dressed casually but neatly, typically in a black or dark turtleneck shirt, with a jacket zipped up to the center of his chest. His hair was long and neatly combed—straight back at the sides and across the top. He parted it on the left side, where my natural part is. The hair had a slight uplift on top, rising to his right.
    He began a pattern of pursuit. He learned where Beverly Forbes ate lunch, and then just happened to wander by at the right moment with his own lunch. He found out where she studied in the library, and when. They discussed great books and writing, and found they shared an interest in the classics, history and poetry. They shared another interest as well, an important one: Each wanted to be a writer.
    Both were working students, he at the newspaper and she as an ad writing trainee for the Clark Richards Advertising Agency in Tacoma.
    They were also the only students in the class who had sold anything. Dad’s “Survival of the Cunning” had been published the year before by Esquire , and during the course he sold another story, “The Jonah and the Jap,” to Doc Savage magazine, published in the April 1946 issue. Like the Esquire story, it was set in World War II, involving characters who developed a clever means of outwitting the Japanese.
    In 1946, Beverly sold a story entitled “Corner Movie Girl” to Modern Romances magazine, for which she received $145.00. The editor told her she liked the sincerity of the story, but thought the plot was a little weak. “Corner Movie Girl” was written as an assignment for the creative writing class she was taking, and it was read before the class and critiqued by her peers and by the instructor. Following a number of suggestions, including some from the blond young man who sat next to her, she rewrote the story.
    â€œCorner Movie Girl” described a plain young woman who was envious of her beautiful friend for the proposals her friend constantly received from men. The plain girl dreamed of falling in love with the heir to a fortune. Subsequently she dated a rich, handsome young fellow, and they went to a fancy place to dance. But the experience left her feeling emotionally unsatisfied, and she felt cheapened for having done it. She returned to her plain, ordinary, no-frills guy, the one she really loved.
    My mother’s story was semi-autobiographical, as many first stories are. She had been overweight during most of her life before college, which made her feel unattractive. She never dreamed of getting a rich husband, though. Idealistic, she always intended to marry for love. Upon meeting Frank Herbert, an experienced man-about-town, she was nineteen, romantic, and somewhat naive concerning affairs of the heart.
    She wrote true-confession stories of love. My father called them “sin, suffer, and repent stories.” He wrote pulp adventures. She was the romantic, very feminine, and he the adventurer, strong and rugged. Both were dreamers, but neither could have had any inkling of the remarkable life they would spend together.
    Frank was having trouble with university officials.