In author Homer Hickam, Jr.'s skillful hands, virtually every frontier known to man-land, sea, and space--has received literary attention.

In his best-selling memoirs, Rocket Boys (also known as October Sky), The Coalwood Way, and Sky of Stone, he described the subterranean coal mines of West Virginia. In his most recent novel, The Keeper's Son, he depicted the sparkling waters of North Carolina's Outer Banks. And in his first novel, Back to the Moon, he gave readers an up close perspective of zero gravity in celestial space.

Despite his literary aplomb, Homer continues to endure indignities usually reserved for those who live in obscurity. Take his often-misspelled name. It's H-i-c-k-a-m, not Hickman, Hiccum, or any other mangled version of the six simple letters. Homer, a junior, also wants to set the record straight about his late father's name—it's Homer, not "John" as the senior Hickam's character is called in the film, October Sky.

By the way, October Sky is also somewhat of a misnomer. The Hollywood-created title is an anagram (words in which letters are shuffled to make other words) of Homer's book title, Rocket Boys. "The movie people thought the coincidence was cosmic," says Homer with a chuckle.

At Home With Homer
In the author's Huntsville study, awards vie for space with models of aircraft and ships, his dad's coal mining lantern, and replica dinosaur bones. The mementos speak of a man with many interests. Homer is a decorated Vietnam veteran, a scuba instructor, an amateur paleontologist, and a retired aeronautics engineer. But writing remains his first love.

"When I came back from Vietnam, I felt this deep emptiness in my life," he says. "I realized after a while that I needed to write. That's what was missing."

Countdown to Fame
Rocket Boys, the real-life story about the Big Creek Missile Agency—the rocket-building club formed by Homer and his childhood friends in their hometown of Coalwood, West Virginia--caused the public's imagination to soar. To create their homemade missiles, the boys learned calculus and chemistry formulations to make fuel, or "rocket candy." They used discarded mine materials to construct their rockets. Cast-iron pipe, pried from beneath abandoned railroad tracks and sold as scrap, provided a source of funding. A coal slack dump on the outskirts of town served as their launching pad. Homer's wonderment at the boundlessness of space ran counter to his father's commitment to Coalwood's mining industry. In the end, the Rocket Boys' bigger-than-life dreams of space win over the terra firma, coal mining hearts of Coalwood citizens.

Currently he's at work on the third book in his new fictionalized series. The books center on the character of Coast Guard Capt. Josh Thurlow. The second book, The Ambassador's Son, comes out in March 2005. It contains some of the same characters found in the first book, The Keeper's Son. Fiery battles at sea, a passionate love story, and humor combine in this novel, set in 1942 on the coast of North Carolina.

"I spent so much time up there researching Torpedo Junction that I absolutely fell in love with the Outer Banks," says Homer. Torpedo Junction, Homer's very first book, is a military history about little-known U-boat skirmishes off the U.S. Eastern coast. "I wanted to do the same thing for the Outer Banks that I did with Coalwood: to re-create a world that no longer exists."