The First Man in Rome

Colleen McCullough was born on June 1, 1937 in Wellington, New South Wales, Australia. She attended Holy Cross College and the University of Sydney. She wanted to pursue a career in medicine but had an allergic reaction to the antiseptic soap that surgeons use to scrub. She decided to study neuroscience and established the department of neurophysiology at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney before working as a researcher and teacher at Yale Medical School for ten years.

Her first novel, Tim, was published in 1974 and was adapted into a movie starring Mel Gibson. During her lifetime, she wrote 25 novels including The Thorn Birds, An Indecent Obsession, A Creed for the Third Millennium, The Ladies of Missalonghi, the Masters of Rome series, and Bittersweet. The Thorn Birds was adapted into a U.S. television mini-series in 1983, which won four Golden Globe awards. She died after a long illness on January 29, 2015 at the age of 77.

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