Brad Steiger was born Eugene E. Olson in Fort Dodge, Iowa on February 19, 1936. He graduated from Iowa's Luther College in 1957 and the University of Iowa in 1963. He taught high school English before teaching literature and creative writing at his former college from 1963 to 1967.
His first book, Ghosts, Ghouls and Other Peculiar People, was published in 1965. He became a full-time writer in 1967. He wrote or cowrote over 150 books including The Johnny Cash Story, The Country Music Scrapbook, The Hypnotist, The Chindi, Alien Rapture: The Chosen, Atlantis Rising, and Four-Legged Miracles: Heartwarming Tales of Lost Dogs' Journeys Home written with Sherry Hansen Steiger. He wrote biographies on Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, and Rudolph Valentino. Valentino served as the basis for the 1977 motion picture Valentino and Unknown Powers was adapted into a documentary, which won the Film Advisory Board's Award of Excellence for 1979.
He received several awards including The Genie for Metaphysical Writer of the Year in 1974 and the Dani for Services to Humanity in Philadelphia in 1977. He was inducted into the Hypnosis Hall of Fame in 1987 and won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the National UFO and Unexplained Phenomena Conference in Minneapolis in 1996. He died on May 6, 2018 at the age of 82.
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