(Re)Discovering Walter Tevis
Okay, this past Saturday night the Paul Newman movie “The Hustler” aired for about the millionth time (I first watched it when I was a kid because my father liked the movie). It’s a great movie (Academy Award noms for Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, and George C. Scott). I’ve known for about twenty years that it was based on a novel by Walter Tevis and I’d made a note to myself to find the book and read it. Since then it’s been in the back of my mind to read (a promise I’ve made every time I’ve watched the movie). Watching it this past Saturday night, it really resonated with me, especially Laurie’s character and performance. So, Sunday morning I went to Amazon to see if a copy of “The Hustler” was reasonably priced. Looking through the books Tevis wrote I discovered he also wrote “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (might have already known this).
I also discovered an interesting “Mockingbird,” about a dystopian future where mankind is illiterate, wanders around in a drug induced haze with only recreational sex as a distraction while robots rule the world. Lastly, a book of short stories, “Far From Home.” I ordered “The Hustler” and “The Man Who Fell to Earth” from Amazon (cool covers, right?), and then went off to my local library to order “Mockingbird” and “Far From Home.”
I went to Wikipedia and looked him up and he had a really interesting life. Tevis was born in San Francisco, his parents moved to Kentucky leaving him behind. At age eleven he traveled cross-country by himself (!) to rejoin his parents. He served in the Navy during World War II. Afterwards he went to college and worked at a pool hall to pay for school. But I was disheartened to find there’s no biography of him (any would be biographers out there looking for a subject?). In the little bit of research that I was able to do I learned that although Tevis had success with “The Hustler” and “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (I’m sure that the Hollywood money made life less worrisome), that he was a largely overlooked and nearly forgotten writer. Reviewers have suggested that “Mockingbird” should be regarded along with Orwell’s “1984” and Huxley‘s “Brave New World,” it won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1980 and PBS was considering a movie version of it to follow-up Ursula LeGuin’s “Lathe of Heaven.”
So, with the books on their way I’ll be reading them soon (I read some of “The Hustler” on Amazon and it had some pretty descriptive language that was pretty cool). After the books arrive reviews will be coming!