Irving Wallace
Irving Wallace was a notable American author and screenwriter, born in Chicago in 1916 to Russian immigrant parents. He spent his early years in Kenosha, Wisconsin, before pursuing his education in California. Wallace began his writing career at the age of fifteen, contributing articles to several well-known magazines. His marriage to Sylvia Kahn in 1941 produced two children, and during World War II, he served as a writer in the U.S. Army Air Forces.
Wallace's literary breakthrough came in 1961 with "The Chapman Report," a provocative exploration of suburban women's sexual lives, which garnered significant attention and was later adapted into a film. He continued to achieve popularity with novels like "The Prize," "The Man," and "The Almighty," often weaving themes of sex, politics, and Cold War intrigue into his works. Many of his novels were successfully adapted into films featuring well-known actors. Over his career, Wallace received numerous accolades for his contributions to literature before he passed away in 1990 due to pancreatic cancer.
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Irving Wallace
Author
- Born: March 19, 1916
- Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
- Died: June 29, 1990
- Place of death: Los Angeles, California
Biography
Irving Wallace was born in Chicago in 1916 to working-class parents, Bessie Liss and Alexander Wallace, who had emigrated from Russia when they were teenagers. Wallace grew up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but was primarily educated in California, attending the Williams Institute in Berkeley and Los Angeles City College. At the age of fifteen, Wallace began his career in letters, writing articles for various newspapers and magazines, eventually being published in such popular periodicals as American Legion Magazine, Liberty, Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and Collier’s. He married Sylvia Kahn in 1941, with whom he had two children.
With the outbreak of World War II, Wallace served in the U.S. Army Air Forces as a writer in the First Motion Picture Unit and Signal Corps Photographic Center. After the war, he continued to write for magazines and began writing screenplays for many run- of-the-mill postwar films. He quit writing for motion pictures because he felt it was work unfit for a serious writer. Wallace published his first novel, The Sins of Philip Fleming, in 1959, but it gained no critical attention. However, this quickly changed with his novel The Chapman Report (1961), which sensationally delved into the sexual lives of suburban American women, similar to the famed Kinsey Report. The novel was adapted as a motion picture and released in 1962.
Many of Wallace’s subsequent novels were popular, including The Prize (1962), The Man (1964), The Seven Minutes (1969), The Word (1972), The R Document (1976), The Pigeon Project (1979), The Second Lady (1980), The Almighty (1982), and The Miracle (1984). His novels mainly are adventurous tales of sex, politics, the lifestyles of the rich and powerful, and Cold War intrigue. His melodramatic fiction has translated well onto the motion picture screen, as several of his novels were made into films with such celebrity actors as Paul Newman and James Earl Jones.
Wallace earned many awards for his writing, including the Supreme Award of Merit and honorary fellowship from George Washington Carver Memorial Institute, the Commonwealth Club silver medal, the Paperback of the Year citation, the Popular Culture Association award of excellence, and the Venice Rosa d’Oro award. Wallace died in 1990 of pancreatic cancer and was buried in California.