Richard Matheson
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Image:Richard Matheson.JPG Richard Burton Matheson (born February 20, 1926, Allendale, New Jersey) is an American author and screenwriter, typically of fantasy, horror or science fiction. Born in 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 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.
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Overview
His 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 up in its parents' attic, 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 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.
He 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. 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 rumored to involve star Arnold Schwarzenegger and director Ridley Scott, hasn't managed to get off the ground.) 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), the latter two adapted and scripted by Matheson himself.
In 1960, Matheson published The Beardless Warriors, a non-fantastic, autobiographical novel about teenage American soldiers in the Second World War. 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.
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. 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".
Homages
A character named "Senator Richard Matheson" appeared in several episodes of The X-Files. The series's creator, Chris Carter, was a fan of Matheson's work on two series that influenced The X-Files (The Twilight Zone and Kolchak: The Night Stalker). Also, the TV series adaptation of "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" had the Szalinski family relocating to the town of Matheson, Colorado.
The telepath "John Matheson" in Crusade was named in honor of Matheson.
Bibliography
Novels
- Someone is Bleeding (1953)
- Fury on Sunday (1953)
- I Am Legend (1954)
- The Shrinking Man (filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man) (1956)
- A Stir of Echoes (1958)
- Ride the Nightmare (1959)
- The Beardless Warriors (1960)
- Hell House (1971)
- Bid Time Return (filmed as Somewhere in Time and subsequently reprinted under that title) (1975)
- What Dreams May Come (1978)
- Earthbound (editorially abridged version published under the pseudonym "Logan Swanson" 1982; restored text published under Matheson's own name 1989)
- Journal of the Gun Years (1991)
- The Gunfight (1993)
- 7 Steps to Midnight (1993)
- Shadow on the Sun (1994)
- Now You See It... (1995)
- The Memoirs of Wild Bill Hickock (1996)
- Hunted Past Reason (2002)
Short Story Collections
- Born of Man and Woman (1954)
- The Shores of Space (1957)
- Shock! (1961)
- Shock 2 (1964)
- Shock 3 (1966)
- Shock Waves (1970)
- Shock 4 (1980)
- Collected Stories (1989)
- By the Gun (1994)
Additional Reading
- California Sorcery, edited by William F. Nolan and William Schafer
External links
es:Richard Matheson fr:Richard Matheson it:Richard Matheson ja:リチャード・マシスン