Book description
A runaway planet hurtles toward the earth. As it draws near, massive
tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions wrack our planet,
devastating continents, drowning cities, and wiping out millions. In
central North America a team of scientists race to build a spacecraft
powerful enough to escaped the doomed earth. Their greatest threat, they
soon discover, comes not from the skies but from other humans.
Edwin Balmer (1883-1959)
Edwin Balmer, born in Chicago, began his career as a reporter for the
Chicago Tribune
in 1903. He then went on to write for books and magazines, becoming an
editor of Redbook
in 1927 and then later associate publisher. With Philip Wylie, Balmer
co-wrote When Worlds Collide
(1933) and After Worlds Collide
(1934), the former being adapted for the big screens in the 1951
award-winning film of the same title. Balmer died in 1959, aged 75.
Philip Wylie (1902 - 1971)
Philip Gordon Wylie was born in Massachusetts in 1902, the son of a
Presbyterian minister and the novelist Edna Edwards, who died when he
was five. He attended Princeton University and, although he wrote
regularly for The Princetonian
and had published his first book by the time he left, his academic
record was unremarkable. After working for a while at a public relations
firm and then for The New Yorker
, Wylie eventually took to writing full-time. He is probably best known
for his 1933 novel When Worlds Collide
, written with Edwin Balmer, which was filmed in 1951 by George Pal's
production company. However, his most lasting influence on modern
culture is by way of the 1930 novel Gladiator, in which a young man is
endowed from the womb with incredible physical abilities, gifted him by
the pre-natal intervention of his scientist father. The young
protagonist who could jump higher than a house, run faster than a train
and bend iron bars in his bare hands was the primary inspiration behind
Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster's Superman
.
