Anton Myrer; Author of ‘Once an Eagle’ and ‘The Last Convertible’

Anton Myrer, 73, who wrote such international best-selling novels as “Once an Eagle” and “The Last Convertible.” The New Englander grew up in the Berkshires, Cape Cod and Boston’s Beacon Hill, which all became settings for his fiction. He interrupted his education at Harvard University to enlist in the Marine Corps during World War II, an experience that was to shape his life and writing. Wounded in Guam, he detailed the grim art of war in his first novel, “Evil Under the Sun,” and in his highly praised 1957 novel of the Marines, “The Big War.” That novel became a film, retitled “In Love and War” starring Robert Wagner and France Nuyen. Myrer’s “Once an Eagle” was made into an NBC miniseries starring Glenn Ford, Sam Elliot and Amy Irving 10 years after the book’s publication, putting the novel on the bestseller lists again. That novel and “The Last Convertible,” published in 1978 and also made into an NBC miniseries, were translated into 19 languages. On Jan. 19 in Saugerties, N.Y., of leukemia.