David fisher author biography

Repeating History Archive

Repeating History, Episode 3 – Bestselling Author David Fisher

David Fisher is a Syracuse University alumnus and the author of more than 20 New York Times bestsellers. His latest book, America’s Deadliest Election, written with CNN National Political Correspondent Dana Bash, is released September 3rd. In this Repeating History, David and and host Robert Searing of the Onondaga Historical Association discuss the fascinating story of the 1872 Louisiana Gubernatorial election. Set amidst the constitutional revolution of Reconstruction, the conversation looks at the violence and partisanship surrounding that election and how its outcome impacted the nation in myriad profound ways. The parallels to our current political moment are legion and the conversation explores the lessons to draw from it.

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British screenwriter

David Fisher (13 April 1929 – 10 January 2018) was a British television screenwriter. He is best known for writing four Doctor Who serials when it starred Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor.

Career

Doctor Who script editor Anthony Read commissioned Fisher to write The Stones of Blood (1978) and The Androids of Tara (1978) for The Key to Time storyline of season 16, and he was subsequently commissioned to write The Creature from the Pit (1979) for the seventeenth season during the tenure of Douglas Adams as script editor. He worked on a story called "A Gamble with Time", also for the seventeenth season, but owing to the divorce proceedings ending his first marriage, he was unable to finish the scripts. That story was reworked and completed by Douglas Adams and then-producer Graham Williams, and was recorded and broadcast as City of Death (1979) under the pseudonym of David Agnew. His final Doctor Who story was season eighteen's The Leisure Hive (1980).

Fisher novelised both The Leisure Hive and Creature from the Pit for the Target book range of Doctor Who novelisations, and appeared extensively on the interview features accompanying the DVD release of the former story. Fisher also wrote novelisations of The Stones of Blood and The Androids of Tara for audiobook releases in 2011 and 2012, which received print editions in 2022. He was also interviewed for a documentary accompanying the DVD release of City of Death.

Fisher's other work included writing for the television series Dixon of Dock Green, Crown Court, and Hammer House of Horror.

Non-fiction

In the late 1980s and 1990s, he often collaborated with Anthony Read on non-fiction history in print, largely related to the Second World War.

Death

Fisher died on 10 January 2018, aged 88, in Nor

For more than three decades, David Fisher has been writing about an extraordinary variety of subjects, ranging from major league baseball umpires to Nobel Prize winning biochemists. He is the author of more than 80 books, among them 24 New York Times bestsellers, and has been a frequent contributor to major magazines and newspapers. He is the only writer ever to have a work of non-fiction, a novel and a reference book offered simultaneously by the Book-of-the Month Club.

He began his professional career as a staff writer for the late comedienne Joan Rivers’ syndicated talk show, That Show. From there he joined Life Magazine, when it was still published weekly, becoming the youngest reporter in that magazine’s history, covering primarily sports and youth culture.

He began his free-lance writing career with a children’s biography of Malcolm X. A year later he co-authored his first bestseller, Killer (Playboy Books) with ‘Joey Black,’ the first confessional written by a Mafia hit man. After writing a second bestseller with Joey Black, Hit #29, which was purchased by Paramount, as well as two additional books, he wrote the very first book about transcendental meditation, Tranquility Without Pills (Wyden Books). He wrote several others books about the world of crime, including Louie’s Widow. In 1980 John William Clouser, who had been on the FBI’s Most Wanted list longer than any man in history, contacted Fisher and asked him to arrange his surrender. After surrendering on national television, Clouser and Fisher collaborated on The Most Wanted Man in America (Stein and Day).

Fisher began writing about sports in the early 1980’s, co-authoring the two “laugh-out-loud bestsellers” (wrote the Times), The Umpire Strikes Back and Strike Two (Bantam Books) as well as two additional books with legendary umpire Ron Luciano, and former Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda’s bestselling autobiography, The Artful Dodger (Morrow). He also collaborated with Eugene