| Activity | Political Scientist and co-author of The Ugly American (1958), Fail-Safe (1962) and The 480 (1965).
He was born in Sheldon, Iowa. His family moved to Los Angeles, California when he was aged 4. Burdick attended Stanford University and Oxford University where he earned a Ph.D. degree in psychology, and he worked at the department of Political Science at the University of California. In 1956 his critically acclaimed novel The Ninth Wave, a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship winner, was published. End 1950s he was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research. He died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 46. |