Arnold Federbush (1935-1993).
Federbush was born in New York, the son of a clothing manufacturer who had been a colleague in Palestine of Zeev Jabotinsky. He attended UCLA's film school, where his classmates included Francis Ford Coppola and Noel Black. His ambition was to be a screenwriter. After some years working as a film editor for Black and others, and finding that pitches for screenplays were better received if they were based on already published books, he wrote his two novels, both of which were successful enough to be translated into many European languages.
Federbush was a lifelong fitness enthusiast, and a non-smoking member of the original Muscle Beach crowd. However, he was diagnosed with lung cancer after it had already spread to his liver. He died with his third novel, concerning spontaneous human combustion, unfinished.
