Maybe not since Jack London, has a writer with such a diversified background emerged. Barry Hickey’s stratified career has taken him to such exotic places as India, the North Pole, Turkey, Greece and the Philippines. Entertainment legends Jackie Gleason, Bob Hope, and Milton Berle all gave him the same advice – “If you’re going to do something do it well and have fun.”

Hickey grew up on the South Side of Chicago. In his late teens he disappeared for weeks at a time, hitchhiking across the United States, Mexico or Canada.

In Chicago, he worked his way through two high schools and three universities as a gas station attendant, elevator operator, hotel desk clerk, bridge painter, steelworker, and canoe guide. He moved to Colorado at the age of twenty-three, acting in several stage productions and singing country music with a band he formed while squeezing in a visit to the North Pole as an electrician and the Colorado high country to top trees.

Moving to Hollywood in the late eighties, Hickey starred in several B movies and guest-starred on episodic television between paying jobs as a senior assistant to heads of production and development at Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures and CBS Television. He also wrote, produced or directed a handful of independent feature films, documentaries and travelogues and wrote dozens of spec scripts, a few of which he sold. Music stayed with him, too, and he returned to the studio again and again to record his original songs. His wanderlust lingered, too with elephant-treks and scuba-dives in Thailand and explorations through Mexico and the Philippines. All fodder for a prolific imagination that would later feed his insatiable writing.

After a string of failed love affairs and a humiliating acting experience in India, Hickey realized it was time to reexamine his life. He returned to Colorado and became a high school English teacher for three years. Always close to his parents, he suffered through their deaths. Next, he sold cars and at the tender age of fifty-one, finally married. He recently wrote three novels and a pair of fresh new screenplays. More songs are still in his head, waiting for his voice and the dim lights of a recording studio.