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Philip Wylie

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Philip Gordon Wylie (May 12, 1902 – October 25, 1971) was a U.S. author. He also wrote as "Leatrice Homesley".

Biography

Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, he was the son of Presbyterian minister Edmund Melville Wylie and the former Edna Edwards, a novelist, who died when Philip was five years old. His family moved to Montclair, New Jersey and he later attended Princeton University from 1920–1923. He married Sally Ondek, and had one child, Karen. Karen married Taylor Alderdyce Pryor, who became a Hawaii state senator. Karen became an author, founder of Sea Life Park in Hawaii, and inventor of animal "clicker" training. After a divorce from Sally Ondek, Philip Wylie married Frederica Ballard who was born and raised in Rushford, New York; they are both buried in Rushford.

A writer of fiction and nonfiction, his output included hundreds of short stories, articles, serials, syndicated newspaper columns, novels, and works of social criticism. He also wrote screenplays while in Hollywood, was an editor for Farrar & Rinehart, served on the Dade County, Florida Defense Council, was a director of the Lerner Marine Laboratory, and at one time was a special adviser to the chairman of the Joint Committee for Atomic Energy. Most of his major writings contain critical, though often philosophical, views on man and society as a result of his studies and interest in psychology, biology, ethnology, and physics. Over nine movies were made from novels or stories by Wylie. He sold the rights for two others that never got produced.

His wide range of interests defies easy classification but his earliest books exercised great influence in twentieth-century science fiction pulp magazines and comic books:

Writing as he did when less potent technology was available, he applied engineering principles and the scientific method quite broadly in his work. His novel The Disappearance (1951) is about what happens when everyone wakes up one day and finds that anyone of the opposite sex is missing (all the men have to get along without women, and vice versa). The book delves into the double standards between men and women that existed prior the woman's movement of the 1970s, exploring the nature of the relationship between men and women and the issues of women's rights and homosexuality. Many people at the time considered it as relevant to science fiction as his Experiment in Crime.

The novel The Paradise Crater (1945) was cause for his house arrest by the federal government; it describes a post-WWII 1965 Nazi attempt to rule the world with atomic power.

His nonfiction book of essays, Generation of Vipers (1942), was a best-seller during the 1940s and inspired the term "Momism". Some people have accused Generation of Vipers of being misogynistic. The Disappearance shows his thinking on the subject is very complex. (His only child, Karen Wylie Pryor, is the author of a classic book for breastfeeding mothers, Nursing Your Baby, and has commented that her father was far from a misogynist.) His novel of manners Finnley Wren was also highly regarded in its time.

He wrote over 100 "Crunch and Des" stories for the Saturday Evening Post, about the adventures of Captain Crunch Adams, master of the charter boat Poseidon, which was the basis of a brief television series. His "Crunch and Des" stories were an apparent influence on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee books.

An article Wylie wrote in 1951 in The Saturday Evening Post entitled 'Anyone Can Raise Orchids' led to the popularization of this hobby - not just the rich, but gardeners of every economic level began experimenting with orchids[1]

In August 1963, his niece Janice Wylie was murdered, along with her roommate Emily Hoffert, in New York City. The crime, which became known as the "Career Girls Murder Case" was at that time the most expensive criminal investigation in New York's history.

Philip Wylie died from a heart attack on October 25, 1971. Some of his papers, writings, and other possessions are in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library.

Bibliography

TV Series

  • "L.A. 2017" (also known as "Los Angeles: A.D. 2017"), directed by Steven Spielberg and featuring Gene Barry, Barry Sullivan, and Edmond O'Brien; an episode of the television series The Name of the Game. A science-fiction dystopia, based around a psychiatric/fascist government in the underground-sheltered remnants of humanity, the aftermath of an environmental (pollution) catastrophe. Wylie wrote the novelization as Los Angeles: A.D. 2017.
  • Crunch and Des was adapted for a syndicated TV series (37 episodes, 1955-1956) starring Forrest Tucker and Sandy Kenyon and filmed in Bermuda.

Novels

  • Heavy Laden (1928)
  • Babes and Sucklings (1929)
  • Gladiator (1930) - one of the main inspirations for Superman and Doc Savage.
  • The Murderer Invisible (1931)
  • Footprint of Cinderella (1931)
  • The Savage Gentleman (1932)
  • When Worlds Collide (1933) (with Edwin Balmer) - Earth is destroyed in a collision with the rogue planet Bronson Alpha, with about a year of warning enabling a small group of survivors to build a spacecraft and escape to the rogue planet's moon, Bronson Beta. Filmed, with major changes to the story, as When Worlds Collide (1951).
  • After Worlds Collide (1934) (with Edwin Balmer) - Continues the story of When Worlds Collide, with both exploration of Bronson Beta and conflict with other groups of survivors.
  • The Golden Hoard (1934)
  • Finnley Wren (1934)
  • Too Much of Everything (1936)
  • An April Afternoon (1938)
  • The Other Horseman (1942)
  • Night Unto Night (1944), filmed in 1949, starring Ronald Reagan
  • The Paradise Crater (1945)
  • Opus 21 (1949)
  • The Disappearance (1951) - An unexplained cosmic "blink" splits humanity along gender lines into two divergent timelines: from the men's perspective, all the women disappear and from the women's, all men vanish. The novel explores issues of gender role and sexual identity. It depicts an empowered condition for liberated women and a dystopia of an all male world. Wylie's setting allows him to investigate the role of homosexuality in situations where no gender alternative exists.
  • The Smuggled Atom Bomb (1951)
  • Three to be Read (1951)
  • Tomorrow! (1954) - Nuclear war story centering around the atomic bombing of two fictional Midwest cities adjacent to each other in the mid-1950s; one has an effective Civil Defense program, the other does not.
  • The Answer (1955)
  • The Innocent Ambassadors (1957)
  • They Both Were Naked (1963)
  • Triumph (1963) - Nuclear war story involving a worst-case USA/USSR "spasm war" where both sides empty their arsenals into each other with extensive use of "dirty" bombs to maximize casualties, resulting in the main characters (in a very deep bomb shelter) being the only survivors in the entire Northern Hemisphere. An excerpt from this novel (or perhaps the whole thing) was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post magazine.
  • The Spy Who Spoke Porpoise (1969) - the President of the United States learns that there is a category of CIA files, code named Zed, to which he is not allowed access.
  • The Sons and Daughters of Mom (1971)
  • The End of the Dream (1972) - foresees a dark future where America slides into ecological catastrophe.

Short stories

  • "Seeing New York by Kiddie Car" (1926)
  • "Jungle Journey" (1945)
  • "Blunder" (1946)
  • "An Epistle to the Thessalonians" (1950)
  • "Philadelphia Phase" (1951)
  • "The Answer" (1955)

Non-fiction

  • A Generation of Vipers (1942)
  • An Essay on Morals (1947)
  • The Magic Animal (1968)

Essays/Articles

The following is a partial list:

  • "Why Colleges Fail Students" Saturday Evening Post (Dec. 13, 1930)
  • "The Quitter as Hero" Harper's Magazine (Oct. 1933)
  • "Writing for the Movies" Harper's Magazine (Nov. 1933)
  • "The Illiteracy of Educators" Saturday Review of Literature (June 3, 1944)
  • "Sex and the Censor" Nation (July 8, 1944)
  • "War and Peace in Miami" New Republic (1944)
  • "Memorandum on Anti-Semitism" American Mercury (Jan. 1945)
  • "How To Admire Writers" Atlantic (1950)
  • "We are Making a Circus of Death" Coronet (1950)
  • "Medievalism and the MacArthurian Legend" Quarterly Journal of Speech (1951)
  • "Panic, Psychology, and the Bomb" Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Feb. 1954)
  • "The Mysterious Doctors of Bimini" Saturday Evening Post (1954)
  • "The Crime of Mickey Spillane" Good Housekeeping (1955)
  • "Predictions: 2001 A.D." (1956)
  • "UFOs: The Sense and Nonsense" Popular Science (March 1967)
  • "McNamara's Missile Defense: A Multi-Billion Dollar Fiasco?" Popular Science (Jan. 1968)
  • "Who Killed Mankind?" Today's Health (Oct. 1970)

Works about him

  • Bendau, Clifford P. Still Worlds Collide: Philip Wylie and the End of the American Dream; San Bernardino: The Borgo Press, 1980. Volume 30 in The Milford Series "Popular Writers of Today", 63 pages. ISBN 0163-2469
  • Breit, Harvey "Talk with Philip Wylie" New York Times Book Review (July 3, 1959)
  • Keefer, Truman F. "Philip Wylie" Boston: Twain Publishers, 1978.
  • Orlean, Susan. The Orchid Thief. New York: Random House, 1998.

References

  1. ↑ Orlean. Page 140.

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