Patricia Cornwell Biography
Patricia Cornwell is a contemporary American crime writer. She is known for writing a best-selling series of novels featuring the heroine Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner. Her books have sold more than 100 million copies.
Patricia Cornwell Age
She was born on June 9, 1956, in Miami, Florida, United States. Currently, she is 63 years old.
Patricia Cornwell Family
Cornwell is a descendant of abolitionist and writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. She was born second of the three children to Marilyn and Sam Daniels. Her father was one of the leading appellate lawyers in the United States and served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.
Cornwell later traced her own motivations in life to the emotional abuse she says she suffered from her father, who walked out on the family on Christmas Day 1961.
She has said, “He was on his deathbed. We knew it was the last time we were seeing each other; he grabbed my brother’s hand and mouthed ‘I love you,’ but he never touched me. All he did was write on a legal pad ‘How’s work?’” In 1961, Marilyn left with three children in tow and moved to Montreat, North Carolina.
Ruth Bell Graham, wife of the evangelist Billy Graham took the wayward family in and arranged for Cornwell and her brothers, Jim and John, to be raised by Lenore and Manfred Saunders, who had recently returned from Africa.
Marilyn Daniels, suffering from severe depression, was hospitalized. Cornwell turned to Ruth Bell Graham as an authority figure, and it was she who noticed that Cornwell’s talent lay in writing and encouraged her literary efforts. A bright student, a capable cartoonist, and a talented athlete on the tennis court,
Patricia Cornwell Education
Cornwell attended King College in Bristol, Tennessee briefly before transferring to Davidson College on a tennis scholarship (which she later rejected), from where she graduated in 1979 with a B.A. in English.
Patricia Cornwell Relationship | Spouse
She married one of her English professors, Charles L. Cornwell, who was 17 years her senior. Professor Cornwell later left his tenured professorship to become a preacher. In 1989, the couple separated, with Patricia retaining her married name after the divorce.
From 1991 to 1992, Cornwell was involved in an affair with Margo Bennett, a married FBI agent, after meeting her at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where Cornwell was doing research for her Scarpetta novels. In 1996, the affair came to light after Margo Bennett’s estranged husband, FBI agent Gene Bennett, was arrested for, and later convicted of, the attempted murder of his wife and the abduction of Margo’s church pastor.
In 2006, Cornwell married Staci Ann Gruber, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University. However, she did not disclose news of her marriage until 2007. Cornwell later stated that turning 50 had made her see the importance of speaking out for equal rights and spoke of how Billie Jean King had helped her come to terms with talking about her sexuality publicly. She lives with Gruber in Massachusetts.
Since childhood, Cornwell has been friends with the family of evangelist Billy Graham and his wife Ruth Bell, often serving as the family’s unofficial spokesperson to the media. She also wrote an authorized biography of Ruth Bell Graham. Cornwell was previously a personal friend of former President George H. W. Bush, whom she referred to as “Big George”, spending a number of weeks at the family’s summer retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine.
Patricia Cornwell Children
This information is under review.
Patricia Cornwell Career
In 1979, Cornwell started filling in as a journalist for The Charlotte Observer, at first altering TV postings, at that point moving to highlights, lastly turning into a columnist covering wrongdoing. In 1980, she got the North Carolina Press Association’s Investigative Reporting Award for an arrangement on prostitution.
She proceeded at the paper until 1981, when she moved to Richmond, Virginia with her first spouse, Charles Cornwell (wedded in 1980), who enlisted at the Union Theological Seminary. That year she started chipping away at the history of Ruth Bell Graham, A Time for Remembering: The Ruth Bell Graham Story (renamed Ruth, A Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham in consequent versions), which was distributed in 1983.
The memoir picked up a Gold Medallion Book Award from the Evangelic Christian Publishers Association in 1985. It additionally, notwithstanding, was a noteworthy hit to her companionship with Graham – they weren’t on talking terms for a long time following the book’s distribution.
Cornwell started to chip away at her first novel in 1984, about a male investigator named Joe Constable and met Dr. Marcella Farinelli Fierro, a therapeutic inspector in Richmond, and resulting motivation for the character of Dr. Kay Scarpetta. In 1985, she accepted a position at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia.
She worked there for a long time, first as a specialized essayist and after that as a PC investigator. She additionally volunteered to work with the Richmond Police Department. Cornwell composed three books that she says were dismissed before the distribution in 1990, of the principal portion of her Scarpetta arrangement, Postmortem, in light of genuine stranglings in Richmond in the late spring of 1987.
The epic won her different honors including the British John Creasey Award, the French Prix du Roman adventure, and the American Edgar Award.
Patricia Cornwell Legal Issues
Leslie Sachs, a creator of The Virginia Ghost Murders (1998), asserted there were likenesses between his novel and Cornwell’s The Last Precinct. In 2000, he sent letters to Cornwell’s distributor, began a site page, and set stickers on duplicates of his novel asserting that Cornwell was submitting written falsification.
The U.S. Locale Court for the Eastern District of Virginia conceded Cornwell a primer directive against Sachs, opining that his cases were probably going to be discovered ridiculously. In 2007, during her slander suit against Sachs, Cornwell affirmed that Sachs had blamed her in online postings for being a “Jew hater” and “neo-Nazi” who paid off judges, plotted to have him murdered, and was under scrutiny by U.S. experts.
The court forever charged Sachs from making abusive allegations against Cornwell and granted Cornwell $37,780 in harms to take care of the expenses of shielding herself against Sachs’ web assaults.
In 2004, Cornwell allocated the executives of her money-related issues to New York-based Anchin, Block and Anchin, overseen by head Evan Snapper. Consenting to pay the firm a base rate of $40,000/month, her legal counselor later guaranteed that Cornwell had contracted Snapper to protect herself from her cash because of her continuous emotional well-being issues and that Snapper knew this and exploited her over her four-and-a-half-year association with the organization.
Cornwell terminated the firm subsequent to finding in July 2009 that the total assets of her and her organization, Cornwell Entertainment Inc., notwithstanding having above $10 million in profit for each year during the past four years, was somewhat under $13 million, the likeness just one year’s total compensation.
After Cornwell recorded the claim, Snapper conceded to abusing effort account guidelines. The court case opened in January 2013, with Cornwell suing the firm for a consolidated total of $100M. On February 19, a Boston jury granted Cornwell US$50.9 million (£33.4 million)
Patricia Cornwell Health problems
She has in the past suffered from anorexia nervosa and depression, which began in her late teens. Cornwell spoke openly about her struggle with bipolar disorder, but in 2015 said that she was misdiagnosed. On January 10, 1993, Cornwell crashed her Mercedes-Benz while under the influence of alcohol. Also, she was convicted of drunk driving and sentenced to 28 days in a treatment center
Patricia Cornwell Political views
Since 1998, Cornwell has donated at least $130,000 to the Republican Party and has made additional individual contributions to Republican U.S. Senate candidates, including George Allen, John Warner, and Orrin Hatch.
She has occasionally supported specific Democratic candidates as well, including Hillary Clinton, Nicola Tsongas, Charles Robb, and Mark Warner. Cornwell has spoken negatively of the presidency of George W. Bush, saying, “I was supportive of young George W. Bush because I liked his family.
I thought he was going to be another Big George. Boy, was I ever wrong? It’s not a democracy so much as a theocracy, and those are not the principles this country was founded on.”
Patricia Cornwell Charity
Cornwell has made several notable charitable donations, including supporting the Virginia Institute for Forensic Science and Medicine, funding scholarships to the University of Tennessee’s National Forensics Academy and Davidson College’s Creative Writing Program (the result of which is the Patricia Cornwell Creative Writing Scholarship, awarded to one or two incoming freshmen), and donating her collection of Walter Sickert paintings to Harvard University.
As a member of the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital’s National Council, she is an advocate for psychiatric research. She has also made million-dollar donations to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the Crime Scene Academy and to the Harvard Art Museum. She donated funds to the Richmond City Police Dept.
and neighboring Henrico County Police Dept. to purchase bullet-proof vests for the police dogs. Cornwell is also a major contributor at the Five Star level to the Veterans Village of San Diego, with lifetime giving of more than $250,000.
Patricia Cornwell Nationality
Her nationality is American.
Patricia Cornwell Net Worth
She has a net worth of $25 million.
Patricia Cornwell Awards
-ECPA Gold Medallion Book Award in the Biography/Autobiography category for A Time For Remembering (1985)
-Edgar Award, John Creasey Memorial Award, Anthony Award, and Macavity Award; for Postmortem (1991) (Cornwell is the only author to receive these awards in a single year)
-Prix du Roman adventures for Postmortem (1992)
-Gold Dagger for Cruel and Unusual (1993)
-Sherlock Award for Best Detective for the character Kay Scarpetta (1999)
-British Book Awards’ Crime Thriller of the Year for the Book of the Dead (2008) (Cornwell is the first American author to receive this award.)
-RBA Prize for Crime Writing 2011 for Red Mist, the world’s most lucrative crime fiction prize at -€125,000.
Patricia Cornwell Bibliography
-Postmortem (1990)
-Body of Evidence (1991)
-All That Remains (1992)
-Cruel and Unusual (1993)
-The Body Farm (1994)
-Potter’s Field (1995)
-Cause of Death (1996)
-Unnatural Exposure (1997)
-Point of Origin (1998)
-Scarpetta’s Winter Table (1998)
-Black Notice (1999)
-The Last Precinct (2000)
-Blow Fly (2003)
-Trace (2004)
-Predator (2005)
-Book of the Dead (2007)
-Scarpetta (2008)
-The Scarpetta Factor (2009)
-Mortuary (2010)
-Red Mist (2011)
-The Bone Bed (2012)
-Dust (2013)
-Flesh and Blood (2014)
-Heart (2015)
-Chaos (2016)
-Hornet’s Nest (1996)
-Southern Cross (1998)
-Isle of Dogs (2001)
-At-Risk / Win Garano series:
-At-Risk (2006)
-The Front (2008)
-Life’s Little Fable (1999)
-Quantum (2019)
-A Time for Remembering: The Ruth Graham Bell Story (1983) [Reprinted as An Uncommon Friend: The Authorized Biography of Ruth Graham Bell (1996) and Ruth, A Portrait: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham (1997)] Biography of Ruth Bell Graham
-Food to Die For: Secrets from Kay Scarpetta’s Kitchen (2002)
-Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed (2002)
-Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert (2017)
-The First Scarpetta Collection. Postmortem and Body of Evidence (1995)
-A Scarpetta Omnibus: Postmortem, Body of Evidence, All that Remains (2000)
-A Second Scarpetta Omnibus: Cruel and Unusual, The Body Farm, From Potter’s Field (2000)
-A Third Scarpetta Omnibus: Cause of Death, Unnatural Exposure & Point of Origin (2002)
-The Scarpetta Collection Volume 1: Postmortem and Body of Evidence (2003)
-Scarpetta Collection Volume 2: All that Remains and Cruel and Unusual (2003)
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