Overview

On Halloween Eve 1938, Orson Welles put on a radio play of War of the Worlds and terrorized an uneasy American public on the brink of World War II, perpetuating the greatest hoax in history and changing media forever. Dead Air brings to life this fateful night and follows the life and career of Welles before and after the historic broadcast.

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9781538187166

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"In this fine-grained account, historian Hazelgrove chronicles the mass hysteria that accompanied Orson Welles's infamous 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. Hazelgrove presents Welles as an actor of immense ambition and preternatural talent, noting that by age 22, he had put on headline-grabbing plays (the government shut down his 1937 production of The Cradle Will Rock, fearing its pro-labor themes would be incendiary) and traveled around New York City in a faux ambulance to move more quickly between his numerous radio and theatrical commitments. The author recounts the rushed scriptwriting process for War of the Worlds and offers a play-by-play of the broadcast, but he lavishes the most attention on the havoc Welles wreaked. Contemporaneous news accounts reported college students fighting to telephone their parents, diners rushing out of restaurants without paying their bills, families fleeing to nearby mountains to escape the aliens' poisonous gas, and even one woman's attempted suicide. Hazelgrove largely brushes aside contemporary scholarship questioning whether the hysteria's scope matched the sensational news reports, but he persuasively shows how the incident reignited elitist fears that 'Americans were essentially gullible morons' and earned Welles the national recognition he'd yearned for. It's a rollicking portrait of a director on the cusp of greatness. -- ""Publishers Weekly"""

In this fine-grained account, historian Hazelgrove chronicles the mass hysteria that accompanied Orson Welles's infamous 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. Hazelgrove presents Welles as an actor of immense ambition and preternatural talent, noting that by age 22, he had put on headline-grabbing plays (the government shut down his 1937 production of The Cradle Will Rock, fearing its pro-labor themes would be incendiary) and traveled around New York City in a faux ambulance to move more quickly between his numerous radio and theatrical commitments. The author recounts the rushed scriptwriting process for War of the Worlds and offers a play-by-play of the broadcast, but he lavishes the most attention on the havoc Welles wreaked. Contemporaneous news accounts reported college students fighting to telephone their parents, diners rushing out of restaurants without paying their bills, families fleeing to nearby mountains to escape the aliens' poisonous gas, and even one woman's attempted suicide. Hazelgrove largely brushes aside contemporary scholarship questioning whether the hysteria's scope matched the sensational news reports, but he persuasively shows how the incident reignited elitist fears that 'Americans were essentially gullible morons' and earned Welles the national recognition he'd yearned for. It's a rollicking portrait of a director on the cusp of greatness. -- ""Publishers Weekly""

Author Information

William Elliott Hazelgrove is the national bestselling author of ten novels and thirteen narrative nonfiction titles. His books have received starred reviews in Publisher Weekly,Kirkus, and Booklist, have been featured in Book of the Month Selections, ALA Editor’s Choice Awards, Junior Library Guild Selections, Literary Guild Selections, and History Book Club Selections, and have been optioned for movies. He was the Ernest Hemingway Writer in Residence where he wrote in the attic of Ernest Hemingway's birthplace. He has written articles and reviews for USA Today, The Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications and has been featured on NPR All Things Considered. The New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, CSPAN, and USA Today have all covered his books with features. Learn more at www.williamhazelgrove.com.

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