According to the Publishers Weekly Twitter account, Tom Clancy died Wednesday in a Baltimore hospital at age 66.
The New York Times has also tweeted the news.
The Baltimore Sun reports that Clancy died at Johns Hopkins after a “brief illness.”
Born in Baltimore, Clancy was an insurance salesman before he went on to write blockbuster espionage books, including The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, and Clear and Present Danger.
Clancy had seven No. 1 USA TODAY best sellers, either solo or with a co-author, and 53 books total in the top 150, solo or with a co-author.
The books spawned commercially successful films with actors Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and Ben Affleck as Clancy’s most famous fictional character Jack Ryan. Clancy’s other famous character, John Clark, has been played by actors Willem Dafoe and Liev Schreiber.
“Tom’s novels have always been prescient, whether they were about technology or military tactics or geo-political maneuvering,” his editor, Tom Colgan, told USA TODAY in 2011after the release of ‘Against All Enemies’.
Clancy and his first wife Wanda married in 1969, and divorced in 1999. He went on to marry freelance journalist Alexandra Marie Llewellyn, whom he had met in 1997.