Don Carpenter

Don Carpenter (March 16, 1931 – July 28, 1995) was an American writer, best known as the author of Hard Rain Falling. He wrote numerous novels, novellas, short stories and screenplays over the course of a 22-year career that took him from a childhood in Berkeley, California and the Pacific Northwest to the corridors of power and ego in Hollywood. A close observer of human frailty, his writing depicted marginal characters like pool sharks, prisoners and drug dealers, as well as movie moguls and struggling actors. Although lauded by critics and fellow writers alike, Carpenter's novels and stories never reached a mass audience and he supported himself with extensive work for Hollywood. Facing a mounting series of debilitating illnesses, Don Carpenter committed suicide in 1995.

History

Don Carpenter was born in Berkeley, California, and lived in Lafayette during the early years of his childhood. He attended and graduated from Berkeley High School. In 1951, Carpenter enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in Kyoto, Japan. During his time in the service, Carpenter was a writer for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, where he met musician and cartoonist Shel Silverstein.

Don Carpenter (electrical engineer)

Donald L. Carpenter is a Space Scientist, Professor (Research) Emeritus in the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University. He co-discovered the sharp dropoff in the plasmasphere surrounding Earth.

Career

Known as co-discoverer of the “knee,” or sharp dropoff (later called the plasmapause) in the radial profile of the dense plasma cloud (later called the plasmasphere) that surrounds the Earth to typical equatorial distances of several Earth radii. Carpenter was awarded the 2002 John Howard Dellinger Medal by the International Union of Radio Science for "his discovery of the plasmapause, for pioneering studies of the plasmasphere structure and dynamics and for development and use of whistler-mode waves as diagnostic probes of the magnetosphere". He was elected a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2002.

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