Walter Tevis
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Walter Stone Tevis (February 28, 1928 - August 8, 1984) was an American author. He was born in San Francisco, California.
His father, a Madison County, Kentucky native, brought his family back to Kentucky from San Francisco when Walter Tevis was ten years old. After serving in the Pacific Theater during World War II, Tevis graduated from Model High School in 1945 and entered the University of Kentucky. While a student there, Tevis worked in a pool hall and published a story about pool written for A. B. Guthrie's writing class. After being awarded a Masters degree from the University, Tevis wrote for the Kentucky Highway Department and taught school in Science Hill, Hawesville, Irvine, Carlisle and then at the University of Kentucky. Walter and Jamie Griggs Tevis were married for 27 years.
He was an English literature professor at Ohio University (in Athens, Ohio) from 1965 to 1978, where he received an MFA. He wrote seven novels, three of which were the basis of major motion pictures of the same names: The Hustler (1959), and The Color of Money (1984) — both about fictional pool hustler "Fast Eddie" Felson. His 1963 science fiction novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth, was filmed by Nicolas Roeg in 1976 and again in 1987 as a TV movie. He also wrote Mockingbird (1980), Far from Home (1981), The Steps of the Sun (1983), and The Queen's Gambit (1983).
Aspects of Tevis' childhood are embedded in The Man Who Fell to Earth, as noted by James Sallis, writing in the Boston Globe:
- On the surface, "Man" is the tale of an alien who comes to earth to save his own civilization and, through adversity, distraction, and loss of faith ("I want to... But not enough"), fails. Just beneath the surface, it might be read as a parable of 1950s conventionalism and of the Cold War. One of the many other things it is, in Tevis's own words, is "a very disguised autobiography," the tale of his removal as a child from San Francisco, "the city of light," to rural Kentucky, and of the childhood illness that long confined him to bed, leaving him, once recovered, weak, fragile, and apart. It was also -- as he realized only after writing it -- about his becoming an alcoholic. Beyond that, it is, of course, a Christian parable, and a portrait of the artist. It is, finally, one of the most heartbreaking books I know, a threnody on great ambition and terrible failure, and an evocation of man's absolute, unabridgeable aloneness. [1]
Tevis was a nominee for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1980 for Mockingbird. During one of his last televised interviews, Tevis revealed that PBS once planned a production of Mockingbird. Tevis spent his last years in New York City as a full-time writer. He died of lung cancer in 1984 and is buried in Richmond, Kentucky.
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