Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson (born February 20, 1926) is an American author and screenwriter, typically of fantasy, horror or science fiction.

Born in Allendale, New Jersey to Norwegian immigrant parents, Matheson was raised in Brooklyn and graduated from Brooklyn Technical School in 1943. He then entered the military and spent World War II as an infantry soldier. In 1949 he earned his bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and moved to California in 1951. He married in 1952 and has four children, three of whom (Chris, Richard Christian, and Ali Matheson) are writers of fiction and screenplays.

Richard Matheson's first short story, "Born of Man and Woman", appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1950. The tale of a monstrous child chained in its parents' cellar, it was told in the first person as the creature's diary (in poignantly non-idiomatic English) and immediately made Matheson famous. Between 1950 and 1971, Matheson produced dozens of stories, frequently blending elements of the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres.

Several of his stories, like "Third from the Sun" (1950), "Deadline" (1959) and "Button, Button" (1970) are simple sketches with twist endings; others, like "Trespass" (1953), "Being" (1954) and "Mute" (1962) explore their characters' dilemmas over twenty or thirty pages. Some tales, such as "The Funeral" (1955) and "The Doll that Does Everything" (1954) incorporate zany satirical humour at the expense of genre clichés, and are written in an hysterically overblown prose very different from Richard Matheson's usual pared-down style. Others, like "The Test" (1954) and "Steel" (1956; later adapted as a Twilight Zone episode), portray the moral and physical struggles of ordinary people, rather than the then nearly ubiquitous scientists and superheroes, in situations which are at once futuristic and everyday. Still others, such as "Mad House" (1953), "The Curious Child" (1954) and perhaps most famously, "Duel" (1971) are tales of paranoia, in which the everyday environment of the present day becomes inexplicably alien or threatening.

Richard Matheson wrote a number of episodes for the American TV series The Twilight Zone, including the famous "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"; adapted the works of Edgar Allan Poe for Roger Corman and Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out for Hammer Films; and scripted Steven Spielberg's first feature, the TV movie Duel, from his own short story. In 1973, Richard Matheson earned an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his teleplay for The Night Stalker, one of two TV movies written by Matheson that preceded the series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Matheson also wrote the screenplay for "Die,Die my Darling" starring Talullah Bankhead and Stefanie Powers.

Novels include The Shrinking Man (filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man, again from Matheson's own screenplay), and a science fiction vampire novel, I Am Legend, which has been filmed twice, under the titles The Omega Man and The Last Man on Earth. (A proposed third film version, under the novel's original title and involving star Will Smith and director Francis Lawrence, is set for release in summer 2007.) Other Matheson novels turned into notable films include What Dreams May Come, Stir of Echoes, Bid Time Return (as Somewhere in Time), and Hell House (as The Legend of Hell House) and the aforementioned Duel, the last three adapted and scripted by Matheson himself.

In 1960, Richard Matheson published The Beardless Warriors, a non-fantastic, autobiographical novel about teenage American soldiers in World War II. During the 1950s he published a handful of Western stories (later collected in By the Gun); and during the 1990s he has published Western novels such as Journal of the Gun Years, The Gunfight, The Memoirs of Wild Bill Hickok and Shadow on the Sun. He has also written a blackly comic locked-room mystery novel, Now You See It..., aptly dedicated to Robert Bloch, and the suspense novels 7 Steps to Midnight and Hunted Past Reason.

Richard Matheson cites specific inspirations for many of his works. Duel derived from an incident in which he and a friend, Jerry Sohl, were dangerously tailgated by a large truck on the same day as the Kennedy assassination. A scene from the 1953 movie Let's Do It Again in which Aldo Ray and Ray Milland put on each other's hats, one of which is far too big for the other, sparked the thought "what if someone put on his own hat and that happened," which became The Shrinking Man. Somewhere in Time began when Matheson saw a movie poster featuring a beautiful picture of Maude Adams and wondered what would happen if someone fell in love with such an old picture. In the introduction to Noir: 3 Novels of Suspense (1997), which collects three of his early books, Matheson has said that the first chapter of his suspense novel Someone is Bleeding (1953) describes exactly his meeting with his wife Ruth, and that in the case of What Dreams May Come, "the whole novel is filled with scenes from our past".
 

Selected Bibliography

Novels

• I Am Legend (1954)
• The Shrinking Man (1956)
• Hell House (1971)
• Bid Time Return (1975)
  • Variant Title: Somewhere in Time (1975)
• Shrinking Man (1978)
• The Incredible Shrinking Man (1988)
• Earthbound (1989)
• What Dreams May Come (1991)
• Journal of the Gun Years (1991)
• I Am Legend: Book One (1991) with Steve Niles
• The Gunfight (1993)
• Shadow on the Sun (1995)
• Seven Steps to Midnight (1995)
• Now You See It... (1995)
• The Memoirs of Wild Bill Hickok (1996)
• Robert Bloch: Appreciations of the Master (1997) with Ricia Mainhardt
• Somewhere in Time (1999)
• Camp Pleasant (2001)
• Abu and the Seven Marvels (2001) with William Stout
• Nightmare at 20,000 Feet: Horror Stories (2002)
• Hunted Past Reason (2003)
• Richard Matheson's Kolchak Scripts (2004)
• Darker Places (2004)
• Unrealized Dreams (2004)
• Duel & the Distributor: Stories & Screenplays (2004)
• Woman (2005)

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