Thomas Gallagher (1918-1992) was a writer whose painstaking research informed nonfiction on great disasters and military heroism and novels that probed the lost lives of bumbling, self-destructive people.
After graduating from Columbia College in 1941, he served in Iran during World War II as a civilian attached to the Army Corps of Engineers. He then shipped out as a seaman on freighters with the merchant marines, where he began to write.
His well-received first novel, The Gathering Darkness (Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), traced the disintegration of a New York family after it lost its fortune in the stock market crash of 1929.
Although he continued to write novels, Gallagher also turned to nonfiction, producing Fire at Sea (Rhinehart & Company, 1959), an investigation of the 1934 fire that destroyed the luxury liner Morro Castle off the New Jersey coast. He concluded that rather than being an accident, the fire was set by the ship's sociopathic radio officer. The book won the Edgar Allen Poe Award for nonfiction.
