Eugene Leonard Burdick was an American political scientist, novelist, and non-fiction writer, known for co-authoring The Ugly American (1958) and Fail-Safe (1962), and for authoring The 480 (1965).

He was born in Sheldon, Iowa, and his family moved to Los Angeles, California, when he was four. Burdick attended Stanford University and Oxford University, where he earned a Ph.D. in psychology. He worked in the department of Political Science at the University of California. In 1956, his critically acclaimed novel The Ninth Wave was published and won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. At the end of the 1950s, he was among the first members of the Society for General Systems Research.

He died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 46.