Frank De Felitta

Frank De Felitta (born August 3, 1921) is an author, producer, director, and pilot.^[1][2][3][4] He is most well known for his novels Audrey Rose and The Entity.

Life and career

Frank De Felitta was born in New York City on August 3, 1921. He served as a pilot in World War II and in 1945 returned to New York, where he began to write scripts. His first effort, for the weekly radio program The Whistler, a popular thriller series, earned him $350 and started him on his writing career. He continued to write radio scripts before turning to television, in which medium he was successful as a writer, producer, and director, winning Emmy nominations in 1963 and 1968 for his documentaries as well as a Peabody Award and several Writers Guild nominations.

By the early 1970s he was working on film scripts, including two he wrote with Max Ehrlich, The Edict (1971)^[5] and The Savage is Loose (1974).^[6] The Edict was filmed as Z.P.G. (1972),^[7] and both it and The Savage is Loose were published as novels by Max Ehrlich.

De Felitta’s first novel, Oktoberfest (1973), a thriller, though not a bestseller nonetheless earned him enough to finance the year and a half he devoted to his next novel, Audrey Rose (1975). This novel, a horror story involving reincarnation, was a smash bestseller, selling more than 2.5 million copies and spawning a successful 1977 film adaptation (scripted by De Felitta) and a sequel, For Love of Audrey Rose (1982). His novel The Entity (1978), based on the real-life case of a woman named Doris Bither who claimed to have been haunted by a spectral rapist, was also a bestseller and was adapted by De Felitta for a 1982 film starring Barbara Hershey. Other successes include Golgotha Falls (1984) and the horror film Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981), directed by De Felitta.

Bibliography

• Audrey Rose
• The Entity
• Oktoberfest
• Sea Trial
• Golgotha Falls
• Funeral March
• L’Opera Italiano

References