Tom Clancy, the beloved author of The Hunt for Red October, died Tuesday in a hospital in Baltimore. He was 66 years old, Huffington Post reported. Ivan Held, the president of Putnam Books, Clancy's publisher, confirmed Clancy's death to the New York Times but did not provide a cause of death.

Clancy's fame as a writer rose after his book, The Hunt for Red October, which accumulated fans from all over, including former United States President, Ronald Reagan. His novel repeatedly climbed their way to hold the number one position on the New York Times Bestseller list and four have been adapted for film.

The in-depth detail within his fictional military stories often had experts baffled as to how he knew what he wrote. When questioned about this quality of his writing he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1987:

"One of the reasons we are so successful is that we have a free society with open access to information…If you change that, if you try to close off the channels of information, we'll end up just like the Russians, and their society does not work. The best way to turn America into another Russia is to emulate their methods of handling information." 

Clancy's latest book, Command Authority, is due for publication this December. NPR reported that he was married twice, to Wanda Thomas and then to Alexandra Marie Llewellyn, and is survived by his wife and five children.