Richard Hooker (author) Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

After the success of his book and its screen adaptations, Hornberger continued to practice as a surgeon in Waterville until his retirement in 1988. During the later years of his practice, Hornberger indulged in medical research and published his research in peer-reviewed medical journals. He died at the age of 73 on November 4, 1997, of leukemia.

A TV series was developed, that debuted in 1972 and ran for eleven seasons with great popularity. Hornberger reportedly did not like Alan Alda’s portrayal of Hawkeye in the TV series, favoring the Robert Altman film, in which Pierce was played by Donald Sutherland.

Hornberger wrote the sequels to MASH — M*A*S*H Goes to Maine (1972) and M*A*S*H Mania (1977) — neither of which enjoyed the commercial success of the original. While MASH was a fairly faithful reflection of Hornberger’s service in Korea, his sequels were diverse representations of the “Swamp Gang’s” post-Korea activities in the fictional town of Spruce Harbor, Maine, from 1953 to the 1970s. Attempts to adapt M*A*S*H Goes to Maine into a film met with failure.

MASH was adapted as a film by the same name, directed by Robert Altman and released in 1970. It was nominated for five Academy Awards and won for Best Adapted Screenplay. According to writer John Baxter, Hornberger “was so furious at having sold the film rights for only a few hundred dollars that he never again signed a copy of the book.”

A series of novels based on the franchise was published in between M*A*S*H Goes to Maine and M*A*S*H Mania in which the characters travel to various locations, including Moscow, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Paris. The books were credited to “Richard Hooker and William E. Butterworth”, although they were written entirely by Butterworth. They were hastily written to capitalize on the TV show’s popularity and were of dubious literary merit. The action was transposed to the 1970s so that people such as Henry Kissinger could be lampooned, but this would have made some of the characters quite old, if the descriptions in the first book were to be believed. For instance, Hot Lips would have been in her 60s, having been described as “fortyish” in the first novel.

Hiester Richard Hornberger Jr. (February 1, 1924 – November 4, 1997) was an American writer and surgeon who wrote under the pseudonym Richard Hooker. Hornberger’s best-known work is his novel MASH (1968), based on his experiences as a wartime United States Army surgeon doctor during the Korean War (1950–1953) and written in collaboration with W. C. Heinz. It was used as the basis for an award-winning, critically and commercially successful movie – M*A*S*H (1970) — and two years later in an acclaimed long running television series (1972–1983) of the same title.