| Activity | Hasford joined the United States Marine Corps in 1967, serving as a combat correspondent during the Vietnam War. His semi-autobiographical novel The Short-Timers was later made into the film Full Metal Jacket. The film's screenplay, nominated for an Academy Award, was authored by director Stanley Kubrick, writer Michael Herr, and by Hasford himself, although his exact contributions were a subject of dispute among the three and ultimately Hasford chose to skip the Oscar ceremonies.
Hasford associated with various science fiction writers of the 1970s (including Arthur Byron Cover and David J. Skal), published in magazines and anthologies such as Space and Time and Damon Knight's Orbit, and briefly shared an apartment with author Harlan Ellison. A bibliophile, Hasford was arrested in 1988 in San Luis Obispo for stealing some 10,000 books from libraries across America and England. Hasford claimed that he had "borrowed" the works to research a never-published book on the American Civil War. He served three months of a six-month sentence and promised to pay damages from the royalties to his next book, a sequel to The Short-Timers called The Phantom Blooper.
Hasford's final novel, a detective story set in Los Angeles called A Gypsy Good Time, was published in 1992. It received little notice and Hasford, suffering from diabetes, moved to the island of Aegina off the coast of Greece. He died there of heart failure on January 29, 1993.
|