The article never ran. Herbert went to Oregon in the fifties to write a piece about the Department of Agriculture planting grasses to hold down the dunes near Florence — sand that had swallowed roads, that had buried parts of towns — and he worked on it, and it didn't come together, and he put the notes aside. The notes kept going. Six or seven years of them, and then Dune in 1965; the piece about the grass stayed unfinished.
He was born in Tacoma in 1920 and worked newspapers most of his life, which I think shows: he was a reporter standing in front of a thing moving slowly enough to study and fast enough to matter. The ripples in the picture here are the same patience, just small. I have two copies of Dune on the shelf; one was loved hard enough that the spine's gone soft, and that's the one people pick up.
Kangaroo rats were in those desert notes, and they earn their place: they drink almost nothing, take their water out of dry seeds, and their kidneys and nasal passages recover most of what they'd otherwise breathe or pass away. A stillsuit with fur on it.
Dune went round something like twenty publishers before Chilton took it — the people who did car repair manuals. An editor there liked it enough to push it through, so the book that built an ecology came out of a house best known for telling you how to fix a carburettor.