“I’ll sacrifice a good sentence for a good paragraph” said Irving Wallace an American historical fiction writer of the twentieth century. Irving Wallace was born in Chicago March 19, 1916 and grew up in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He attended Williams Institute, Berkeley were he studies creative writing and Los Angeles City College. At the age of fifteen he began his writing career as a journalist for newspapers and magazines.
During WWII he served in the U.S. Army Air Force. He was a writer in the First Motion Picture Unit and Signal Corps Photographic Center. He also wrote for magazines during this time such as The American Legion Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. From 1948 to 1958 he produced screenplays for Hollywood.
In 1959 Wallace wrote his first novel called The Sins of Philip Fleming. However his breakthrough novel was The Chapman Report which was published in 1961. He novel was influenced by the Kinsey report. In 1963 a film was made based on his novel directed by George Cukor. Several of his novels have been made into films such as The Seven Minutes (1969) and The Prize (1963). After this book Wallace published mainly popular novels. The novel he wrote called The Man(1964) won the Supreme Award of Merit and honorary fellowship from George Washington Carver Memorial Institute. He also won various other awards. In 1972 he was a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and the Sun Times Wire Service at the Democratic and Republican national convections. In 1977 he co-authored a nonfiction book with his son David called The Book of Lists.
On June 29, 1990 Wallace died of pancreatic cancer in Los Angeles. A interesting fact, which also gives a insight to American history, is his son David when doing genealogical research on the family found out that the family’s original last name was “Wallechinsky”. It was anglified to Wallace by a US Immigration clerk.
Feinberg Library has four of his books; The Plot, The Man, The Fabulous Originals: Lives of Extraordinary People who Inspired Memorable Characters in Fiction and The Square Pegs: Some Americans who Dared to Be Different. The Man written in 1964 imagines America led by an African American president.
I should also mention that whatever we do not have in our library you can most likely get through ILL. You can search World Cat for these items much like you search Feinberg’s catalog. When you are on Feinberg Library’s homepage instead of clicking Search Feinberg click Search Worldwide. You can also click on Search SUNY which will search the library’s of the SUNY network and you will probably get the item you need faster. So if any of these author’s interest you but we do not have that book you do have options!
