Myers, Henry
Entry updated 7 October 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1893-1975) US composer, lyricist, playwright, screenwriter and author, brother-in-law of Ben Barzman; like him he suffered blacklisting at the hands of the House Unamerican Activities Committee after 1947; he had been active from the early 1920s. His screenplays, many collaborative, include The Big Broadcast of 1936 (1935) directed by Norman Taurog, which features the Invention of a "Radio Eye", a "televisor" which can see anything in the world and display it; Alice in Wonderland (1949) directed by Dallas Bower; and at least one episode of Tales of Tomorrow (1951-1953).
Myers's second novel, The Utmost Island (1951), imports fantasy deities into a Viking saga. The protagonist of his third, O King, Live for Ever (1953), having been born just after 1850 and seemingly a man in middle age over a century later, has devoted his life to its indefinite prolongation (see Immortality) through a conscious engineering of Evolution as applied to himself; some resemblance to the élan vital articulated by Henri Bergson (1859-1941) in Creative Evolution (1907), and espoused by George Bernard Shaw (and others), seems evident; his interlocutor's marriage to his daughter mildly evokes Eugenical tropes.
The Winner of World War III (1966), a Near Future talking-animal story about World War Three, does not seriously name, as the winner of that conquest, the cockroach who narrates the tale, and who bears some resemblance to Don Marquis's archy. [JC]
Henry Myers
born Chicago, Illinois: 24 June 1893
died Los Angeles, California: 30 October 1975
works (selected)
- The Utmost Island (New York: Crown Publishers, 1951) [hb/]
- O King, Live for Ever (New York: Crown Publishers, 1953) [hb/Paul Galdone]
- The Winner of World War III (Berlin, German Democratic Republic: Seven Seas, 1966) [pb/uncredited]
links
previous versions of this entry