Philip Wylie  

      (1902-1971)

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Biografie
Philip (Gordon) Wylie, geboren 1902, war ein so vielseitiger wie vielschreibender Philosoph, Essayist und Romanautor. Berühmt und berüchtigt wurde er mit seiner Abrechnung mit amerikanischen Mythen unter dem Titel 'Generation of Vipers', es folgte ein (von Jung bewunderter) 'Essay On Morals', der den verdrängenden Umgang mit Sexualität anprangerte. Dieser Bestseller, mit dem sein Name heute am ehesten verbunden wird, griff insbesondere Frauen in ihrer (die Männer dominierenden) Rolle als Mutter und Hausfrau an. Eine Ablehnung zugleich von Religion und Objektivitätsglauben verband er mit der Anhängerschaft an die Lehren Freuds und Jungs, später auch Darwins. Seine Romane, die immer wieder mit essayistischen Einschüben durchsetzt sind und in fiktionalem Gewand Wylies Thesen verbreiten sollen, haben dennoch hohen Unterhaltungswert. Neben seinen frühen Gesellschaftsromanen (Heavy Laden, Finley Wren, der vielen als sein bester Roman gilt, As They Reveled, Too Much of Everything) bediente er sich sehr oft des Science-Fiction-Genres: Mit 'Gladiator' erfand er einen unglücklichen Supermann und inspirierte die Comic-Serie. In 'The Disappearance' beschreibt er die plötzliche totale Trennung der Welt von Männern und Frauen - und hier kommen die Frauen deutlich besser weg als in 'Generation of Vipers'.  In späteren Romanen schildert er Atomkriege und die nukleare Apokalypse. 'Night Unto Night',  die Vorlage für Don Siegels Film, zwei Jahre nach 'Generation of Vipers' veröffentlicht, ist eine Aufbereitung der Thesen seines polemischen Essays. Philip Wylie starb 1971.
Ein großer Teil der Informationen und Zitate stammt aus Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 43


Bibliografie



HEAVY LADEN. Knopf, New York, (1928)


Sein 1. Roman.

"The son of a minister, Wylie rejected the rigid morality of Christianity and endorsed the 'new morality' that favored a more relaxed attitude to sexuality. Wylie dramatized this dilemma as the generational conflict between a strict Presbyterian minister and his free-spirted daughter in his first novel."
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 43

"H.L. is a spectacular first novel. Bursting with vitality it sputters and thunders by turns, telling the story of a vigourous minister of the gospel and his headstrong daughter through the medium of a style which is such a welter of impressionism, bombast, excellent writing and sensationalism at all costs as can hardly be contained between book covers. (...) He goes about the writing of prose in a manner reminiscent of the vaudeville man who plays an entire orchestra single-handed. The result is entertaining, in all but those passages in which he takes himself too seriously, or pretends that there is something radically new about some of his methods."
'An Ohio Clergyman', in The New York Times Book Review, April 1, 1928, pp.6, 14 

"H.L. probably never can be put in free circulation by public libraries; it will disgust all those who have a definite notion of what is decent in a novel and what should not be mentioned. As likely as not it will do more harm than good - simply because it will be so often misunderstood. But to those who do see what Mr. Wylie is driving at, who by experience and by temperament can sympathize with him, the novel will be a notable success. No one can deny its occasional brilliance; no one can be lukewarm in his attitude." Robert MacDougall, 'A Lusty Story' in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. IV, No. 46, June 9, 1928, pp. 945-46


BABES AND SUCKLINGS (1929)

"BaS, drawn partially from Wylie's troubled relationship with his first wife, questions the validity of the institution of marriage in the twentieth century."
CLC, Vol. 43

"In Babes and Sucklings a good deal of the bombast has simmered down to more orderly turbulence. As far as the subject matter of his tirades is concerned, Mr. Wylie has learned no better manners in the last year, but he has at least reconciled his animosities to a consistent literary style."
'Complex People' in The New York Times Book Review, April 14, 1929, p.6

"(Wylie) actually succeeds in making vice as boring as virtue, and combines all teh familiar features of the rising-youn-writer story with all the dreary preachments of Sigmund Freud and Lucy Stone. The tale deals with a rather unspecified young man named Thornton and a blonde divorcée from California named Cynthia who live 'beautifully' in free love and eventually become reconciled  to each other in spite of it. (...) One has the feeling that the author felt under tremendous urgency to get it all off his chest, at the cost of jerky construction, banal plot, and prolonged preachments."
A review of 'Babes and Sucklings' in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. V, No. 39, April 20 1929, p. 935


Generation of Vipers (1941)

Polemische Generalabrechung mit Amerika und amerikanischen Werten.

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Library Journal 12-96

"[Wylie] could give H. L. Menken a run for his money as the most opinionated person of the 20th century."

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New York Herald Tribune

"Wylie is a good showman, and he cracks his prose over his opinions like a bull whip. His chapters on the common man and the common woman, sex science, professors, 'mom,' Cinderella and education are tumultuous reading. Each reader will find a place where he will wince, but that will be made up for by the places where he can laugh at his neighbor and read passages aloud to his wife. . . . A helter-skelter book that is as full of things that provoke laughter as it is packed with pages that induce thought. Mr. Wylie wrote the whole thing at the top of his voice."

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Time

"A raging set of lay sermons about the human predicament as examined in terms of 'your home and kiddies, mom and the loved ones, old Doc Smith and the preacher, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the "Star-Spangled Banner"in short, the American scene' plus the still uglier clutter backstage. Wylie's high desire is to save the human race from its own worst enemy - itself."


By Frank Zepezauer, Resident philosopher of "The Liberator" Source

Philip Wylie - philosopher and prophet extraordinaire

Recovering the Past

He said, "The idea that women have that life is marshmallows which will come as a gift — an idea promulgated by every medium and many an advertisement — has defeated half the husbands in America." He said, "The adoration of motherhood has been made the basis of a religious cult ... Megaloid momworship has got completely out of hand ... Mom is everywhere and everything and damned near everybody, and from her depends all the rest of the U.S."

He said, "The women of America [have] raped the men, not sexually, unfortunately, but morally ..."

He said, "These young men, fresh-startled by learning that She is a chrome-plated afreet, but not able to discern that the condition is mom's unconscious preparation of somebody's sister for a place in the gynecocracy...."

He said, "[Women] are taking over the male functions and interpreting those functions in female terms."

He said, "I give you the woman in pants, and the new religion: she-popery ..."

Who is "he"? One of today's rare anti-feminist critics or perhaps some marginalized misogynist?

Not exactly. His is not a contemporary voice. It was first heard in 1942. Nor is the man whose voice we heard a misogynist, although a swarm of critics since that time have tried to hang that label on him. In fact, the book in which those remarks appeared has been cited as an example of a pervasive misogyny which provoked the feminist movement.

"He" is Philip Wylie, novelist and social critic. Wylie made those remarks in his best known critique of the American psyche, Generation of Vipers. It contained a chapter, "A Specimen American Myth," which examined the younger female's predilection toward "Cinderellaism," and a chapter, "Common Women," which examined the older female's predilection toward "Momism." Wylie wrote many books and articles, fiction and nonfiction, but he is best remembered for poking fun at the American myth of motherhood which he called "momism." He has been since praised or damned largely because of what he said about the myth in Generation of Vipers.

In that book he also poked fun at many other American myths — about business men, military men, professors, and clergymen, for example — and his poking punctured a lot of hot air balloons that were floating high in our cultural heavens at the time. Wylie thus did not set out to write an entire book that would focus on our myths of the female. It was just one of several myths that he targeted. But his treatment of the female myth is what has kept his memory alive.(...) He called America a "gynecocracy" and a "matriarchy," a nation whose inner life was run by women for women.

In his two chapters on our female myths, Wylie focuses mostly on women's work, women's political activism, women's monetary interests, and women's public image. With regard to the work, he wrote that "a great nation of brave and dreaming men absent-mindedly created a huge class of idle, middle-aged women ... Nowadays, with nothing to do ... every clattering prickamette in the republic survives for an incredible number of years to stamp and jibber in the midst of man, a noisy neuter by natural default or a scientific gelding sustained by science, all tongue and teat and razzmatazz. The machine has deprived her of social usefulness; time has stripped away her biological possibilities ..." (...)

Ironically, just as Wylie was writing Generation of Vipers there was, in response to the World War II manpower emergency, a great influx of women into the work force. But when the war ended the "Rosie the Riveters" returned home to make way for returning veterans. Not all of them were happy to give up paid employment and their feelings helped foster the great breakout the occurred twenty-five years later.

Betty Friedan and other feminists would interpret the 1950s return to housewifery as evidence of an oppressive patriarchy which forced women into domestic drudgery. But, as Wylie pointed out, women had a lot to say about our domestic arrangements, possibly more so than men. He noted for example the lobbying power they enjoyed. Two of the major political movements of the 19th century, the women's suffrage and the temperance movement, were run primarily by women. And, in 1942, women were still moving and shaking.

Wylie writes that "mom is organization-minded. Organizations, she has happily discovered, are intimidating to all men, not just to mere men. They frighten politicians to sniveling servility and they terrify pastors; they bother bank presidents and they pulverize school boards. Mom has many such organizations, the real purpose of which is to compel an abject compliance of her environs to her personal desires ... As an interesting sidelight, clubs afford mom an infinite opportunity for nosing into other people's business. nosing is not a mere psychological ornament for her; it is a basic necessity. Only by nosing can she uncover all incipient revolutions against her dominion and so warn and assemble her co-cannibals." (...)

In his chapter about "Cinderellaism," which examines the attitudes of young females, he argues that Americans had corrupted the Cinderella myth, whose original intent was to demonstrate the values that could be discovered in simple life. The Prince, in the earlier story, could not find true female virtue and value among the fancy ladies in his court. He discovered them among the rags that Cinderella wore.

However, "Our rags-to-riches theme gives scant attention to the virtues rags may conceal; it deals mainly with the lucky escape from rags ... We put all emphasis on reward." (...)

The power of this myth has caused us to turn " most of our fixed wealth over to our women. "Woman spends it. The absurd posturing of chivalry serve, to boost the nonsensical notion of honoring and rewarding women for nothing more than being female. Cash is heaped at the feet of the sweetheart, the bride, the wife, and especially "mom." Since money does represent a crystallization of human energy, this gave females an inordinate power."

Our economy, says Wylie, is driven by catering to the needs and desires of women. Most of our consumer goods are manufactured for women. Most of our advertising is designed to attract their attention. Most of our wealth is in their hands. "Women possess some eighty percent of the nation's money and I need only allude, I think, to the statistical reviews which show that the women are the spenders, wherefore the controlling consumers of nearly all we make with our machines."

Women have managed this great transfer of wealth and power, Wylie argues, in large part because they have created a mythology, a feminine and a maternal mystique..."momism" which is what "Cinderellaism" becomes as women approach their middle years. "Mom is an American creation. Her elaboration was necessary because she was launched as Cinderella. Past generations of men have accorded to their mothers, as a rule, only such honors as they earned by meritorious action in their individual daily lives. Filial duty was recognized by many sorts of civilizations and loyalty to it has been highly regarded among most peoples. But I cannot think, offhand, of any civilization except ours in which an entire division of living men has been used, during wartime, or at any time, to spell out the word `mom' on a drill field...."

This cult of mother came about because of the economics of Cinderellaism.

Only a few women could find a Prince. The rest had to find another way to achieve queenly status. "The only way to cushion the shock destined to follow the rude disillusionment over the fact that they are not really Cinderella is to institute momworship. Since he had already infested both male and female with the love of worldly goods, a single step accomplished the entire triumph: he taught the gals to teach their men that dowry went the other way, that it was a weekly contribution, and that any male worthy of a Cinderella would have to work like a piston after getting one, so as to be worthy, also, of all the moms in the world."

How did American women manage this great scam? Wylie refers to the ultimate source of female power, the ability to influence the minds and hearts of men when, as infants, they are completely vulnerable to maternal conditioning. Wylie himself discloses he was able to escape this influence because he had no mother. "I, who grew up as a `motherless' minister's son and hence was smothered in multimomism for a decade and a half, had an unusual opportunity to observe the phenomenon at zero range." (...)

Wylie makes the same observation about the other myths he exposes in Generation of Vipers, the myth of the business man for example or the military man. The danger of myths, he points out, is that they can obscure your perception of reality, and the reality Wylie was primarily concerned about was the dark side of human nature. The Cinderella and the Momism myths have concealed from men, and also from women, the dangerous forces that can be activated within the female soul.

This point appears very early in Wylie's chapters on American women. He begins his chapter on Cinderellaism, for example, by saying that "in order to perpetrate upon ourselves the monstrous half-consciousness by which we have been living, we have, perforce, developed bastard legends. These legends suit half a human personality, most admirably. Their development, as such, was unconscious—for we chose unconsciousness by our act of spiritual self-aggrandizement and the repudiation of the dark half of our heritage...."

In his chapter on momism, he points out how young men are not prepared for "the first brutal contacts with modern young women....Perseus was carefully not told that the Gorgons had blondeback hair and faces on the other side, like Janus, which, instead of turning him to stone, would have produced orgasms in him. Thus informed he would have failed to slay Medusa and bring back her head....Our young men are screened from a knowledge of this duality also, but they are told only about the blonde side. When they glimpse the other, and find their blood running cold and their limbs becoming like concrete, they carom off, instanter to mom. Consequently, no Gorgons are ever clearly seen, let alone slain, in our society."

Wylie later points out the many images of the female dark which have appeared in our culture. "I give you Yggdrasell's ash. I give you Medusa and Steno and Euryale. I give you the harpies and the witches and the Fates." And then he offers their contemporary incarnation, "I give you the woman in pants, and the new religion: she-popery." (...)



Selected Short Stories of Phillip Wylie


Night Unto Night

Armed Services Editions 774


The Savage Gentleman
WylieP.&BalmerE. Philip When Worlds Collide
Triumph
The Smuggled Atom Bomb (1951)
Gladiator

In this book, the protaganist's superhuman strength brings him only humiliation and villification. So much good he can do for himself and the world. But how?

It is a realistic account of what would really happen to a superhuman ( Someone capable of easily lifting 4000 lbs ) if he were placed among us mortals . Thoughtfully written - typical of Wylie's style , it took you through the life and events of such a person - mainly how other people would react to him and his difficulty to blend in with the human race (everyone was inferior to him). Philip Wylie also showed , in his own philosophical style , how nature dealt with something that was not natural or belonged here .

A reader , July 21, 1995

As the precursor to the Superman-myth, this book is fascinating reading. While the origin of the character is somewhat preposterous and Wylie's writing in general is dated, the concept of an existentialist superman carries the reader through the book faster than a speeding bullet. I guess Wylie didn't think his protagonist would become a masked mystery-men like the characters that were populating pulp fiction at the time, because he finds only misery in using his powers openly. Here is a man that's truly alone: there's no one else on the planet that's operating on the same level as him. He tries fitting in. He tries solitude. Finally, he tries to be altruistic and make a difference, but learns that even a superman can't change the world if it doesn't want to be changed. The ending is even worse than the beginning--deux ex machina to the extreme. But the middle of the book is extremely enjoyable.


Obsf: Philip Wylie's "Gladiator" (1930), the novel which, along with the "Doc Savage" pulps, was one of the primary inspirations for Superman. Unlike the comic the novel is very cynical.


The Answer

Synopsis

In this novella, a beautiful being is found lying in a clear pool of water near where an island had been only moments ago--before the U.S. military dropped an H-Bomb on it. The being lay motionless, relaxed as if in death. It is an angel. Fear abounds that the military has shot down the angel Gabriel. At about the same time, the Russians are testing their own bomb in Siberia, and an angel is found by them also. Simultaneous hardcover release from Dove books.


The Disappearance

Eine Trennung anderer Art erfolgt im Roman "Das grosse Verschwinden" (The Disappearance) von Philip Wylie von 1951. Durch ein bestimmtes Ereignis entwickeln sich Maenner und Frauen ploetzlich und unvorbereitet in getrennten "Dimensionen". Die Entwicklung in der Dimension der Frauen beinhaltet eine ganze Reihe Katastrophen, waehrend es "bei den Maennern" etwas glimpflicher ablaeuft.
Franz-Josef Wirtz

The Disappearance ranks with Finley Wren, by the same author, as two of the finest books I've ever read.

In an instant, all the women disappear from the men, and all the men disappear from the women -- and two parallel worlds exist. Wylie as usual shows an uncanny ability to zero in on the topics which would (and have) become the most pressing. Even where it's dated it's still entertaining and never condescending. I find it particularly interesting that the Men get into a nuclear war --- and the Women make world peace.

Wylie's belief is that we created the segregation of the sexes ourselves and we started it at the dawn of time. He further believes it didn't have to be this way.

Although "The Disappearance" has won no awards or recognitions for writing excellence that I've been able to uncover, it was indeed good company and often rose to the profound. I enjoyed reading this book immensely and note that it can be found in various places on the web. I liked it so much that I shelled out fifty dollars for a first edition. I got extra paperbound copies easily from Bibliofind ranging between four and ten dollars.

Philip Wylie was considered a controversial writer in his day. The main thesis of this book, "what makes us male and female (although Wylie also attacks the double standard regarding what is appropriate behavior for men and women) seems to have been typical of his writing. Wylie contrives to study this concept by splitting the universe into two parallel universes. In the male universe it appears as if the women just disappeared at about five minutes after four. All humans of the female gender disappeared: wives, mothers, sisters, girls, and babies. To the women, in their universe, the effect was exactly the same. At about five minutes after four, all men disappeared, even the male infants they were nursing. Having been trained in the methods of social science research, this would be the perfect experiment, somewhat unethical, but perfect. Just as any behavioral scientist would have in the same conditions, Wylie has complete control over both universes. He can, and does, show us what we would do without the opposite sex. His vision of a world without women, where men are alone with themselves, is very sad to me.The duration of the separation in Wylie's book was two years.

One possible reason for some of the reading difficulty lies in Wylie's choice for his main characters - an academic couple. The husband, Robert Gaunt, is a philosopher with several degrees and his wife, Paula, also holds a doctorate degree but has chosen to remain at home (this is where Wylie really hammers away on the double standard for men and women's lives that was preeminent before the woman's movement of the 70's and yet still prevails today).

For most of the book our viewpoint character is Robert and it is those sections where he is trying to think through to a solution of the book's crisis that the reading bogs down. Robert tends to be long winded. I must point out that things are not nearly so taxing to read, yet are just as scholarly, when we read from Paula's viewpoint. I have no way of knowing if this was intended as a way to show that women in the 50's were at least as intelligent as men or perhaps superior. Or, Wylie could simply be as prescient as he proved in 1945 when his novel "The Paradise Crater" described a post-WWII 1965 Nazi attempt to rule the world with atomic power. His prescience was good enough then tocause his house arrest by the federal government. (1)

Because in the fifties men were in control of nearly everything, they didn't have to suffer as much as quickly. Yes, they had to find all the male babies who had been deserted but the factories ran, water poured from kitchen taps, trains kept their schedule and the government was a resilient source of support. However, there was also rioting, looting, and the resurgence of gang violence.

In the woman's universe things are much better socially but fall apart functionally. According to Wylie, because men had kept women home and ignorant of the way the world works, even keeping them out of careers that would have kept the turbines generating electricity, the trains running and the water on, the women suffer more and it comes quickly. Yet he doesn't leave us to think that women are incapable. There are many that have the necessary training or are willing to learn what it takes to keep things running. Wylie's women do a great job but are limited by how society has dominated them. Wylie clearly argues that we are fools to allow the intellectual potential of women go to waste.

Finally, both sexes have to deal with an atomic threat from the Russians after the disappearance occurs. This is just one of many vehicles Wylie uses to point outdifferences between the sexes.

I make no judgement on the homosexuality that occurs in "The Disappearance." Homosexuality is to be expected in a book where genders find themselves alone. I am rather surprised that Wylie was able to publish a book that contains so much about homosexuality in such a homophobic period of time. Homosexuality occurs in both universes and I bring it up here, not by way of condemnation, but because I feel Wylie was trying to say something in his 1951 novel. The minority of men who do so, seem to go about their sexual orientation change in a highly immature manner. Whereas the women are more serious, looking for long term, supportive relationships, and are more sensible about how they approach one another. Wylie shows us few women parading around in men's clothing or forcing compliance.

Perhaps one of the most unique conclusions that Robert Gaunt (Philip Wylie) arrives at is that there are no gender differences. Males and females both have the same organs, just specialized for related functions. We begin life with an identical set of genitials up until the third month of prenatal development. It is only then, due to prenatal conditions caused by the presence of a Y chromosome, that our mirrored organs begin their differentation. Some become ovaries or testes others a uterus or urethra. There is only one sex, Gaunt tells us, and without a partner, you are only half a sex. Paula discovers this one genderism within herself when she is approached by a lovely young woman for whom she has provided a home. After turning down the offer of a sexual relationship, Paula begins to recognize the maleness within her - the drive, the confidence, and many of the other traits so often associated with men. Clute and Nicholls tell us that Philip Wylie, "became notorious for his penetrating surveys of US mores and behavior, and who coined the term "Momism" to describe the US tendency to sacralize motherhood, thus making family dynamics and morality impenetrable to reflection."

(http://hatrack.com/lostbooks/review006.shtml)


Tomorrow! (1954)

A novel of "America under Atomic Attack." Vintage cover art; good novel by the novelist Philip Wylie

A reader from brooklyn , August 10, 1998

A Fine and Gripping Novel

I first read this book as a fourth grader and it mesmerized me and horrified me both. Now, thirty years later, it's still powerful reading -- the narration of the actual nuclear attack is spellbinding. We know a great deal more about the effects of a nuclear war now -- for example, the book mentions fallout but it is not depicted as a major problem, and sadly things would be much, much worse in what's left of River City and Green Prairie than the book depicts. But considering how little even experts knew at the time, the book is terrifyingly accurate. It's also just a great read, and ranks with Frank's Alas, Babylon and Wylie's own Triumph (which is confoundedly hard to find!) as a classic of the Age of Anxiety.

By the way, if you enjoy this, then you MUST track down a copy of Wylie's LATER nuclear war novel, "Triumph," and decide for yourself whether or not he topped this earlier work. It's a toss-up!


The Murderer Invisible


The End of the Dream

DAW 77

[email protected] from Silicon Valley , June 23, 1999

The author's last book, but not his best

I'm fairly certain _The End Of The Dream_ is Phillip Wylie's last book; alas, it is not one of his best. Although it contains some unforgetable imagery, the thread holding everything together is frayed and breaks in places. Still, the plane crash into the Regency Towers, the Antarctic exploitation, and the mass deaths due to bad air vividly illustrate his theme of the horrors coming from environmental abuse - particularly his "vibes", which will stay with long afteryou'd like.

<[email protected] (Mark R. Leeper)>

24 Jan 88 23:55:55 GMT

A book review by Mark R. Leeper

So I am re-reading THE END OF THE DREAM, a novel about the end of the world through environmental disasters. My first reaction is that people who claim that Orwell was right "on target" with 1984 should read this novel to find out what "on target" really means. It is eerie how close some sections of this book reflect events that have occurred since it was written. Wylie describes a toxic chemical firestorm in New York City. Not quite accurate enough to make it history, but pretty close to a number of events that have happened. There have been toxic fires near New York and, of course, the Mexico City firestorm. Wylie describes how addicted we are to material goods, so while environmentalism has waves of popularity, they die down and we go back to poisoning the environment. That's a direct hit. He has descriptions of industry paying for "ubiquitous displays of the American future as purged of pollution... [The displays] did not say or much reveal how the 'glory of natural America' would be recovered, or who would do it, where the money would come from or what sacrifices and hardships would accrue to any such attempt. It merely displayed the FAITS ACCOMPLIS, everywhere, clear air, clean rivers, and deserts made green, with the endlessly hammered slogan,'America CAN! America WILL!'"

Wylie writes with an incredible authenticity and a feel for public psychology. The above was from the last chapter I read. Wylie starts the current chapter I am reading talking about the destruction of a certain part of the potato crop and how the public only understands it in termsof a shortage of potato chips.

(http://www2.lysator.liu.se/sf_archive/sf-texts/books/W/Wylie,Philip.mbox)

(Liste: http://www.scifilist.com/display.asp)


Crunch & Des

For the most fun you can have with a fishing book, try Crunch and Des: Classic Stories of Saltwater Fishing by Philip Wylie (320 pp.; 1990. Published by The Lyons Press. Hardcover, $24.95). Crunch and Des, a fictional, Miami-based charter skipper and first mate team, appeared as short stories, often in The Saturday Evening Post, during and after World War II. They are just plain wonderful, a kind of Norman Rockwell view of saltwater fishing-pure, delightful escape reading for any reader anywhere.

(http://www.outdoorlife.com/bookstore/saltwater.html)


Wylie, Philip. THREE TO BE READ. Rinehart, New York, (1951). First edition. The second story in this collection, 'Sporting Blood', is a Crunch and Des story.$65.00 U.S.

Wylie, Philp. TREASURE CRUISE AND OTHER CRUNCH AND DES STORIES. Rinehart, New York, (1956). First edition.

Crunch and Des are the master and first mate of a charter fishing boat in Florida. Many of their stories were published in the Saturday Evening Post in the 40's and 50's. They are minor cult figures today.


Philip Wylie als Fischer

Charlie Courtney

Earlier this year, on a windy and unfishable winter's weekend, I discovered the writings of Philip Wylie (1902-1971) hidden deep within the bowels of the new downtown county library building. Writing in The Saturday Evening Post for much of his career, Wylie -- the antithesis of Zane Grey and Grey's he-man vs. the sea monster image -- did more than any other author of his time to promote the idea that offshore fishing was a sport anyone could participate in, not just the muscular and well-heeled in their mega-yachts. He also championed the notion that there was plenty of exciting light tackle angling available inshore for those who lacked the finances, physical condition, or inclination to go offshore and do battle with the big ones.

Wylie's popular "Crunch and Des" stories (more than 100 were written, and there was even a brief television series) were set in and around the charter boat business, and most were set in southern Florida and the Keys of the 1930s, '40s and '50s. The subject of Wylie's stories was Captain Crunch Adams, master of the charter boat Poseidon and a former professional boxer. Crunch was very much a man's man with a strong sense of honor, justice, and fair play. He was also a man of action who usually settled his run-ins with blackguards of every sort in a simple, direct manner involving timely application of black eyes and broken jaws.

You never know what you will get when you read a Crunch and Des story. It may leave you rolling on the ground in laughter at the antics of Des (Desperate Smith, the Poseidon's eccentric first mate), crying along with heartbroken lovers (who happened to charter the Poseidon), nervously turning the page as Crunch matches wits with desperate criminals (who hijacked the Poseidon), smiling along with a heartwarming tale of a big fish and a small boy (guess whose boat he's on), or simply enjoying a rousing fish tale.

No matter the plot, each tale often had a good fish story imbedded within it, and, since Crunch chartered for both offshore and inshore trips, there was a remarkable variety of accurate fishing lore hidden within each tale -- a reflection of the author's wide experience as a salt water fisherman.

Despite his broad experience, Wylie had notoriously bad luck as a fisherman -- once losing an $800 outfit overboard to an untimely blue marlin strike. However, he enjoyed talking (and writing) about such disasters, and once he even said he could recall ever having only two lucky days of fishing in his life. Wylie soon found that he was not the only fisherman plagued with ill fortune. This led him in 1941 to endow the Philip Wylie Hard Luck Trophy for the Greater Miami Fishing Tournament, to be given to the angler showing "grim effort in the face of hopeless predicament" or who had the "worst break" of the tournament.

You can more read about the life and times of Philip Wylie (along with many other famous figures in the sport of salt water fishing) in George Reiger's Profiles in Saltwater Angling (Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973). The Alachua County Library has Crunch and Des: Stories of Florida Fishing (1948), The Best of Crunch and Des (1954), and Treasure Cruise, and Other Crunch and Des Stories (1956). Other collections of Crunch and Des stories that I have not been able to find locally include Salt Water Daffy (1941), Fish and Tin Fish (1944), and The Big Ones Get Away (1954). Wiley also wrote Denizens of the Deep, True Tales of Deep-Sea Fishing (1953) and several novels unrelated to fishing.

(http://www.afn.org/~gofc/wylie.html)Charles H. Courtney ([email protected])


Filmografie
Murders in the Zoo (1933)

Regie: Edward Sutherland

Star: Lionel Atwill, Charlie Ruggles, Randolph Scott, Gail Patrick,

John Lodge

62 Minutes | Universal Studios Home Video | HiFi

Inhalt:

Atwill plays a jealous sportsman and zoologist who dispatches his wife's real and imaginary suitors with a variety of wild animals in this extremely gorey (for 1933) horror feature.

This bizarre pre-code horror film follows the exploits of a wealthy zookeeper whose incredible insecurity about his marriage leads him to murder the man he feels his wife has fallen in love with. He accomplishes his gruesome crime by sewing his rival's mouth shut then abandoning him in the jungle. A chain of death follows, as the doctor attempts to keep the murder a secret, and all his weapons of choice come from the animal kingdom: tigers, alligators, lions, snakes. But he who lives by the sword, often dies by the sword....

Regie: Edward Sutherland
Star: Lionel Atwill, Charlie Ruggles, Randolph Scott, Gail Patrick, John Lodge
Featured: Kathleen Burke, Harry Beresford
Kamera: Ernest Haller
Drehbuch: Philip Wylie, Seton I. Miller


Cinderella Jones (1946)

Regie: Busby Berkeley

Drehbuch: Charles Hoffman (I), Philip Wylie (story)


Springtime in the Rockies (1942)

Regie: Irving Cummings

Drehbuch: Walter Bullock, Ken Englund, Jacques Théry, Philip Wylie (story)


Under Suspicion (1937)

Regie: Lewis D. Collins

Drehbuch: Joseph Hoffman, Jefferson Parker, Philip Wylie(story)


Second Honeymoon (1937)

Regie: Walter Lang (I), Phil Rosen

Drehbuch: Kathryn Scola, Darrell Ware, Philip Wylie (story)


Charlie Chan in Reno (1939)

Regie: Norman Foster (I)

Drehbuch: Frances Hyland, Robert E. Kent, Albert Ray, Philip Wylie (story Death Makes a Decree)


Island of Lost Souls (1933)

Regie: Erle C. Kenton

Drehbuch: Waldemar Young und Philip Wylie nach dem Roman  von H.G. Wells (The Island of Dr. Moreau),


Death Flies East (1935)

Regie: Phil Rosen


King of the Jungle (1933)

Regie: H. Bruce Humberstone

Drehbuch: Max Marcin, Fred Niblo Jr., Charles Thurley Stoneham (story The Lion's Way), Philip Wylie


Gladiator, The (1938)

Regie: Edward Sedgwick


When Worlds Collide (1951)

Regie: Rudolph Maté

Drehbuch: Edwin Balmer, Philip Wylie (Roman), Sydney Boehm


Philip Wylie

by Truman Frederick Keefer

Philip Wylie : The Man and His Work

by Robert Howard Barshay

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