Best-selling author Tom Clancy, whose wildly successful thrillers made him one of the biggest publishing phenomenons of his time, has died in the US aged 66.

Clancy arrived on best-seller lists in 1984 with The Hunt for Red October. He sold the manuscript to the first publisher he tried, the Naval Institute Press, which had never bought original fiction.

A string of others soon followed, including Red Storm Rising, Patriot Games, The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears, and Without Remorse.

Clancy had said his dream had been simply to publish a book, hopefully a good one, so that he would be in the Library of Congress catalogue. Four of his books, The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and the Sum of All Fears were later made into films, with a fifth based on his desk-jockey CIA hero, Jack Ryan, set for release later this year.

Born in Baltimore on April 12, 1947 to a postman and his wife, Clancy entered college to study physics, but switched to English saying later that he was not smart enough for the rigours of science.

Ironically, his novels carried stiff doses of scientific data and military detail.

After graduation in 1969, he married his wife Wanda and joined her family's insurance business, all the while putting down ideas for a novel.

In 1979, Clancy began Patriot Games, in which he invented Jack Ryan. In 1982, he put it aside and started The Hunt For Red October, basing it on a real incident in November 1979, in which a Soviet missile frigate called the Storozhevoy attempted to defect.

By a stroke of luck, president Ronald Reagan got Red October as a Christmas gift and quipped at a dinner that he was losing sleep because he could not put the book down - a statement Clancy later said helped put him on the New York Times best-seller list.

It led to a string of hits, both on the page and in Hollywood blockbusters. He even ventured into video games with the best-selling Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent.

The latest Jack Ryan movie, directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Chris Pine, is set for release in the US on Christmas Day. Keira Knightly plays Jack Ryan's wife and Kevin Costner plays his mentor at the CIA.

Clancy lived in rural Calvert County, Maryland, and in 1993 he joined a group of investors who bought the Baltimore Orioles baseball team.