Writer:
Philip Wylie
- Born: May 12, 1902
- Died: Oct 25, 1971
- Occupation: Writer
- Active: '30s-'40s
- Major Genres: Mystery, Comedy
- Career Highlights: Island of Lost Souls, The Gladiator, Springtime in the Rockies
- First Major Screen Credit: Island of Lost Souls (1932)
Biography
Philip Wylie was one of those rare writers who managed to have a major cultural impact as a provocative and bold essayist during the 1940s and 1950s, while also enjoying considerable success as a screenwriter and novelist from the late '20s until the end of the 1950s; many of his books also served as the basis for movies and television shows. Philip Gordon Wylie was the son of Presbyterian minister Edmund Melville Wylie and the former Edna Edwards, a novelist, who died when he was five years old. As a boy, Wylie escaped from his grief over his mother's death and his subsequent loneliness by plunging into books, and he was later put on a path of youthful rebellion by his father's remarriage. By the time he entered his teens, Wylie was an erudite and very independent thinker who displayed a complete disdain for middle-class propriety and for authority figures of almost any kind. The family's move to Montclair, NJ, put Wylie within just a few miles of New York City, and he was soon traveling there regularly and immersing himself in theater and the visual arts as well as writing. He attended Princeton University for two years, but his rebellious nature, coupled with his low grades, got Wylie dropped by the university following his sophomore year. He turned to writing advertising and public relations material and enjoyed some success for three years, until a scandal -- in the form of an unfounded paternity suit that he still lost -- destroyed his business and also made it impossible for Wylie to return home. Instead, he became a freelance author and rose to the top of his profession, his work -- in such diverse areas as adventure, romance, mystery, and science fiction -- appearing in many of the top magazines in the country over the next 30 years. He became well known in the late '20s and beyond for his exciting plots and carefully drawn characters and settings, and also for his daring subject matter, some of which was very personal. His debut novel Heavy Laden (1928), for example, seemed to draw from his own life and his impressions of his father, dealing with a Presbyterian minister whose personal and professional hypocrisy alienates his daughter and drives her to rebellion and self-destruction; Gladiator (1930) -- which served as one of the inspirations for the comic book character Superman -- dealt with the unhappy plight of the truly superior being in a society that encourages mediocrity and anonymity. Wylie's 1932 novel The Savage Gentleman subsequently became the basis for the character of Doc Savage, who would grace the pages of fiction and comic books as well as movies and television in the decades to come. He also wrote an overtly autobiographical novel entitled Finnley Wren (1934), which told of a character with life experiences nearly identical to his own, that attacked women (and the feminism of the period), modern education, and tabloid journalism with particular venom. Growing out of his youthful obstinacy and iconoclasm, and hardened by his experience of the lawsuit and, perhaps, a tempestuous first marriage, he loved to tweak middle-class society, especially where its so-called "morality" and language and sexual taboos were concerned -- thus, Wylie occasionally wrote or edited articles with titles such as "The Impossibility of Rape" (part of a 1935 collection called The Bedroom Companion) and other provocative (in the most literal sense) designations; his 1938 novel An April Afternoon was a lance aimed at the heart of what he regarded as straight-laced authority, with its tale of two people, foster brother and foster sister to each other, who fall in love and pursue a romantic relationship despite the disapproval of all around them. Later, when he became identified with other, broader, bigger targets, he authored books with names such as Opus 21: Descriptive Music for the Lower Kinsey Epoch of the Atomic Age, a Concerto for a One-Man Band. Wylie spent a couple of years in Hollywood during the early '30s, adapting others' stories as well as turning out screenplays of his own. His major contribution was the screenplay from The Island of Lost Souls (1932), based on H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, although he also wrote (uncredited) parts of the screenplay for James Whale's The Invisible Man (1933), which, curiously, was also adapted from a Wells source. He was responsible for writing (with Seton Miller) one of the more bizarre and grisly revenge melodramas of the era, Murders in the Zoo (1933), at Paramount. His direct input to Hollywood ended after 1933, and his next credited screenplay would come 38 years later (for television), but many of Wylie's books and stories were brought to the screen throughout the 1930s, including a slapstick adaptation of Gladiator, done with Joe E. Brown, and thrillers such as Death Flies East (1935), Under Suspicion (1937), and Charlie Chan in Reno (1939), as well as romances like Second Honeymoon (1937) (adapted from a novel-length article in Redbook), which was later turned into a musical as Springtime in the Rockies (1942). His 1944 novel Night Unto Night, about a suicidally depressed widow who finds herself drawn romantically to a dying man, was optioned by Warner Bros. and adapted to film by director Don Siegel in 1947 as the latter's second full-length film -- Night Unto Night, released in 1949, starred Viveca Lindfors and Ronald Reagan. During the 1930s and 1940s, Wylie was one of the highest-paid writers in the world. Essentially, he enjoyed two simultaneous careers, with a huge following among enthusiasts of science fiction, adventure, and deep-sea fishing stories (which remain among the most celebrated in the genre), and satiric fantasy tales, but he also became known as a leading social critic among the intelligentsia. He wrote books attacking the American Left's embrace of Joseph Stalin and the American Right's willingness to overlook the threat of Hitler's rise to power in Germany. His most influential book of this period, however, was Generation of Vipers (1943), which was written at the behest of his second wife. This was a collection of essays in which Wylie attacked numerous American sacred cows, most notably the American woman of the era -- his essay "Common Women" introduced the phrase "Momism" to the language, and proceeded to savage the modern American mother as the "Great Emasculator." Although its impact was felt most strongly in intellectual circles, the essay and its phrasing became a rallying cry that would be embraced in the subsequent decade by the far Right, and by other authors such as Robert A. Heinlein, whose book Starship Troopers was one of several works attacking what he regarded as a weak and weakness-spawning American culture of the late '50s, whose faults were based in "Momism." This same fault seemed to lay at the heart of the script for Leo McCarey's anti-Communist drama My Son John (1952). Along with Ayn Rand, he was among the most influential author/essayists of the American political Right during the 1940s and 1950s. Wylie continued to write fiction that had an edge to it, often with a very serious purpose (all while still authoring articles and putting together collections of his work on deep-sea fishing and other popular subjects). His novel The Disappearance (1951) is a startling polemic about the differences between the two sexes, built on a science fiction premise: One day, the male and female populations of the world vanish from each others' presence, and suddenly each has to survive without the other; the men's world continues to function mechanically but falls apart socially; the women's world fails to function on a material level because their population is incapable of running the machines needed to keep the infrastructure operating. By the 1950s, Wylie was well known for his serious writing and satires, but it was a screen adaptation of a 19-year-old work -- and perhaps the most mainstream piece he wrote in his whole career -- that made him newly visible as a popular science fiction author. In 1951, his early-'30s book When Worlds Collide (co-authored with Edwin Balmer) was adapted into a film by producer George Pal (who also reportedly wanted to make a movie out of The Disappearance). Made at Paramount with Rudolph Maté directing, When Worlds Collide was a rare big-studio science fiction effort, and even more unusual as a color production with a big budget. If it missed the lofty mysticism and energizing symbolism of Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still -- made the same year at 20th Century Fox -- the movie retained enough of the spirit of Wylie's book to tease the viewer with its observations on humanity, while keeping an exciting pace and displaying some dazzling special effects. Even in its own time, the book had been popular enough and sufficiently rich in ideas worth pursuing to justify a sequel, After Worlds Collide (1934), which, alas, has never been filmed. Wylie's popularity waned as the 1950s came to an end. His work was, in a sense, too well known for its own good, and its familiarity made it seem predictable to the editors who were coming up late in the decade. Additionally, the magazines themselves were being squeezed by a generational change in America, as readership declined with the rise of television as an entertainment medium -- he did write for the bold, upstart magazine Playboy in the late '50s, but that publication had yet to exert the influence on taste that it would in the decade hence. Generation of Vipers was soon forgotten, along with "Momism," as new issues came to occupy the political and intellectual Right, which managed to expend most of its energy and credibility in the cause of defending the Vietnam War and, too often, opposing civil rights legislation, over the next decade. Wylie, unwilling to make changes in either his work or his somewhat lavish lifestyle, found himself in debt after a lifetime of success, and he soon succumbed to depression, alcoholism, and drug addiction. He hung on across a decade of decline and despair -- only the 35-year-old When Worlds Collide, ever in print since the movie, seemed to keep his name before the public as a fiction author -- and managed to generate some intriguing new work during the late '60s an early '70s. These included philosophical writings (The Magic Animal), espionage thrillers (The Spy Who Spoke Porpoise), and a pair of despairing but far-reaching critiques of the world, The Sons and Daughters of Mom (1971), a sort of follow-up to Generation of Vipers in which he attacked '50s and '60s liberalism and its spawning ground (harking back to the "Great Emasculator"), and The End of the Dream (1972) (co-authored with John Brunner), a prediction of the end of civilization resulting from rampant, unwise industrial development and activity. Around 1970, Wylie proved that he could still see (if not find) the cutting edge of popular culture when he wrote a teleplay for an episode of the series The Name of the Game, starring Gene Barry, entitled "Los Angeles A.D. 2017" -- on the show, in an extended quasi-dream sequence, he depicted a United States of that future date in the midst of an environmental disaster, being run as a corporation with regional vice presidents, none of whom will take responsibility for the tragedy unfolding before them at the risk of reducing profits. It was later published as Los Angeles: A.D. 2017. Wylie died of a heart attack in the fall of that same year, but his work continues to manifest itself -- his 1951 book The Disappearance was evidently part of the inspiration for the 1998 comedy/fantasy film Honey, I Sent the Men to the Moon. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie GuideADVERTISEMENT
