Eighty six years after the War of the Worlds broadcast, interest in the infamous Orson Welles radio show has not dimmed.
On social media, the October 30, 1938 radio hoax is invoked almost daily by opposing political camps in their attacks on the ability of the mainstream media to mislead a gullible American public.
Best-selling author Willliam Elliot Hazelgrove (Forging a President: How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt and Madam President: The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson) recounts the Mercury Theatre On the Air broadcast and how it impacted Welles’ career in his upcoming book, Dead Air: The Night that Orson Welles Terrified America. Rowman and Littlefield will publish Dead Air in hardcover and ebook on November 19.
The book has already been hailed as “a rollicking portrait of a director on the cusp of greatness.”
In its online pitch, Rowman and Littlefield says that Hazelgrove “illustrates for the first time how Orson Welles’ broadcast caused massive panic in the United States, convincing listeners across the nation that the end of the world had arrived and even leading military and government officials to become involved. Using newspaper accounts of the broadcast, Hazelgrove shows the true, staggering effect that Welles’ opera of panic had on the nation. Beginning with Welles’ incredible rise from a young man who lost his parents early to a child prodigy of the stage, Dead Air introduces a Welles who threw his Hail Mary with War of the Worlds, knowing full well that obscurity and fame are two sides of the same coin. Hazelgrove demonstrates that Welles’ knew he had one shot to grab the limelight before it forever passed him by — and he made it count.”
In its review of Dead Air, Publishers Weekly says that Hazelgrove presents Welles as “an actor of immense ambition and preternatural talent, noting that by age 22, he had put on headline-grabbing plays (the government shut down his 1937 production of The Cradle Will Rock, fearing its pro-labor themes would be incendiary) and traveled around New York City in a faux ambulance to move more quickly between his numerous radio and theatrical commitments. The author recounts the rushed scriptwriting process for War of the Worlds and offers a play-by-play of the broadcast, but he lavishes the most attention on the havoc Welles wreaked. Contemporaneous news accounts reported college students fighting to telephone their parents, diners rushing out of restaurants without paying their bills, families fleeing to nearby mountains to escape the aliens’ poisonous gas, and even one woman’s attempted suicide.”
In what is likely a reference to A. Brad Schwartz’s exhaustively researched 2015 book Broadcast Hysteria, Publishers Weekly noted that Hazelgrove “largely brushes aside contemporary scholarship questioning whether the hysteria’s scope matched the sensational news reports, but he persuasively shows how the incident reignited elitist fears that ‘Americans were essentially gullible morons’ and earned Welles the national recognition he’d yearned for. It’s a rollicking portrait of a director on the cusp of greatness.”
Hazelgrove has a master’s degree in history. His books have hit the National Bestseller List, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist, Book of the Month Selections, Literary Guild Selections, History Book Club Bestsellers, Junior Library Guild Selections, and ALA Editor’s Choice Awards. He was the Ernest Hemingway Writer-in-Residence, where he wrote in the attic of Ernest Hemingway’s birthplace.
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