By Michael Shnayerson

Three years ago, Sebastian Junger was a 35-year-old freelance writer publishing his first book—a true-life account of a commercial fishing boat lost off Gloucester, Massachusetts—with a modest advance and almost no expectations. Then The Perfect Storm hit with all the force of its subject. A big prepublication movie-rights sale, a sheaf of admiring reviews, and a profile or two showcasing the author’s swarthy good looks all worked to make Junger’s debut a publishing phenomenon.

The Perfect Storm rode the New York Times best-seller list for a year in hardcover, then moved over to the paperback list, where it has remained for two years. Now comes the movie, out June 30 from Warner Brothers, directed by Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot) and starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg as doomed crew members. With that kind of push, the paperback may yet double its mark of 1.5 million copies sold.

In person, Junger is gracious and candid, but guards an emotional reserve. Unmoved by his success, often self-deprecating, still he reveals flashes of a surprising, bedrock confidence. Most writers, in starting out, look for staff jobs on magazines or newspapers, and write what they’re assigned (even Hemingway did that).

Junger spent his 20s reporting stories he assigned himself, then trying, usually in vain, to get them published. When success finally came, he braced for it as he would against one of the 50-foot [15-meter] waves he describes with such technical aplomb in his book. Thus the [New York City] walk-up, the old shirt and jeans—and his utterly clear sense of what to write next.

For that preternatural assurance, he may have his parents to thank. Junger has called himself “the classic lost child of a creative family,” allowed to drift until he found himself—or drifted out to sea—but he seems to have been encouraged, from an early age, to see his life as an intellectual quest.

His father, born in Germany of Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Austrian forebears, came to America during the war in part because his father was Jewish, in larger part—so he apparently felt—to study engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He started a small but successful consulting company in Cambridge, specializing in acoustics.

Sebastian’s mother, Ellen Sinclair, is a painter of local renown: One of her landscapes, featuring big, Van Gogh-like strokes, hangs a bit crookedly on her son’s bedroom wall.