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Fletcher Knebel (October 1, 1911 — February 26, 1993) was an American author of several popular works of political fiction.

Knebel was born in Dayton, Ohio, but moved a number of times during his youth. He graduated from high school in Yonkers, New York, spent a year studying at the Sorbonne and graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 1934. Upon graduation, he received a job offer from the Coatesville Record in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. He spent the next 20 years working in newspapers, eventually becoming the political columnist for Cowles Publications.

In 1960, he wrote a chapter on John F. Kennedy for the book Candidates 1960. This seemed to ignite a passion for writing books and he turned his hand to book-length works. He wrote fifteen books, most of them fiction, and all of them dealing with politics. His best-known novel is Seven Days in May (1962), (co-written with Charles Bailey II), about an attempted military coup in the United States. The book was a huge success, staying at number one on the New York Times bestseller list for almost a year, and was made into a successful movie in 1964.

Knebel was married four times from 1935 to 1985. He committed suicide after a long bout with cancer, by taking an overdose of sleeping pills in his home in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1993. He is the source of the quote: "Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics".

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Fletcher Knebel", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0