Sailor, soldier, scholar, sot, journalist, novelist, lyricist, plagiarist, poet, pothead, hack, flak, columnist, critic, cad. Words on paper, on screen, between covers, on air, by note, by rote, in earnest, in jest, in hope, in despair, in desperation, contemplation, consternation, celebration. Words, words, words, by the book, by the count, by the barrel, by the hour, by the buck. Words by the sea, by the light of the moon, words by-and-by, words bygone, words unborn,… who’ll buy my words?

Larry Savadove’s first novel, “The Sound of One Hand,” was hailed in The New York Times Book Review as “the best novel about Japan I have ever read… it out-Micheners Michener a hundred-fold.”

That was some 40 years ago. So what has he been doing since then? After a stint as a creative director with McCann Erickson International in the Far East and Latin America he returned to this country and produced documentaries in Hollywood. Credits include episodes of “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau,” “National Geographic Society Specials,” and the “In Search of…” and “On Location” series. He has won Writers Guild awards, two Emmy nominations and one Oscar nomination. He also co-produced several TV movies, one of which, “Fear on Trial,” won an Emmy.

A graduate of Harvard College where he was Managing Editor of The Crimson, Savadove grew up in Camden, New Jersey “where I learned how to duck,” and worked for a while on the Sun Oil Co.’s tankers on the Texas-Philadelphia run, “where I learned how to walk,” and on a ranch in New Mexico. He served in the army, heading the Indochina Desk for Military Intelligence from Hq. in Japan before the official start of the Vietnam War.

In 1990 he came back to the shore of his childhood summers on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, where he was an editor for The SandPaper and contributed to other papers and magazines, winning several awards including the New Jersey Press Association Journalist of the Year. He retired from editorial duties to write books but still does a weekly column - “Savvy” - because “I have all these opinions and if I don’t spit them out they go sour and upset my stomach.”

He co-authored the best-seller, “Great Storms of the Jersey Shore,” (Down the Shore Publishing) now in its 9th printing and still the gold standard of shore books, and wrote a novel, “The Oyster Singer" (Down the Shore Publishing).

A new novel, “What Can You Do With a Drunken Sailor,” is now ready to seek publication and another, “Mini Golf Open” is near-ready. In addition are shorter works he calls "Seldom Told Tales" aimed at that ineffable age “between adolescence and the rest of life, as now.”