Shepherd Mead

Shepherd Mead, born Edward Mead (April 26, 1914 – August 15, 1994) was an American writer and is best known as the author of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which was adapted into a hit Broadway show and motion picture. Mead, a native of St. Louis, Missouri, graduated with an A.B. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1936. He joined the Benton & Bowles advertising agency in 1936 as a mail-room clerk, and worked his way up to a vice-presidency by the time he left in 1956 to pursue a writing career.

In 1957 Mead moved to Switzerland and in the following year to Great Britain, where he worked as an advertising consultant. He went on to write 19 novels, including The Big Ball of Wax: A Story of Tomorrow's Happy World (1954) describing life in the future year 1993, and The Carefully Considered Rape of the World: A Novel about the Unspeakable (1965), in which all of Earth's fertile women are simultaneously impregnated by baboon-like extraterrestrials. In 1968 he moved back to Switzerland, but then returned to Great Britain in 1978. He died in London in August 1994.