Born in New York and educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, Nelson Gidding said that he had been interested in writing ever since he was a child and had a poem published in the Boy Scouts magazine ("That was as recently as the mid-'20s!" he laughed). A POW during World War II, Gidding began writing his first (and only) book "End Over End" while in prison camp; after the war's end, he segued into TV work ("Suspense, " "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, " many others) and ultimately into movies. His list of film credits includes such well-respected titles as "Odds Against Tomorrow, " "The Haunting, " "The Andromeda Strain" and (with co-writer Don Mankiewicz) the Oscar-nominated screenplay for "I Want to Live!", the story of the last years of real-life prostitute Barbara Graham (Susan Hayward) and her gas chamber execution on murder charges. "I Want to Live!" was Gidding's first film for director Robert Wise, with whom he has worked on several subsequent occasions. In his later years he taught a class in screenwriting at the University of Southern California.